‘Surveillance Schools’ are emerging around the globe; characterised by new technologies and practices that identify, verify, categorise and track pupils in ways never before thought possible. The ramifications are huge. So says the English sociologist (who’s currently working in Canberra, Australia) Emmeline Taylor in a 2013 book published by Palgrave, titled Surveillance Schools: Security, Discipline and Control in Contemporary Education.
As she set out, CCTV has become common, and a range of biometric technologies such as fingerprinting, iris scanning and palm vein readers are finding their way on to campus. Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) microchips are being embedded in school ID cards. And as she pointed out, this represents ‘a shift from human-centred strategies of discipline to technological mechanisms that bring with them new narratives of risk, fear and control’.
You can read the chapter on CCTV as a free download courtesy of the publisher. To buy the book, whether in print or ebook, visit http://www.palgrave.com/gb/book/9781137308856#aboutAuthors. It’s one of the Crime Prevention and Security Management series of scholarly books, edited by Prof Martin Gill of Perpetuity.
To read the sample chapter visit https://he.palgrave.com/resources/sample-chapters/9781137308856_sample.pdf.
Of the two dozen books in the series, the most recent is about corruption in prisons, Tackling Correctional Corruption (also by Australians as it happens), reviewed in the November 2016 print issue of Professional Security magazine.
