In Dark Matters Simone Browne locates the conditions of blackness as a key site through which surveillance is practiced, narrated, and resisted. She shows how contemporary surveillance technologies and practices are informed by the long history of racial formation and by the methods of policing black life under slavery, such as branding, runaway slave notices, and lantern laws. Placing surveillance studies into conversation with the archive of transatlantic slavery and its afterli...

The field-defining text for black geographies—now with a new foreword and afterwordThe initial publication of Demonic Grounds in 2006 marked a watershed for the field of geography: revealing how human geographies are a result of racialized connections and black placemaking practices, this book opened the discipline to feminist, interdisciplinary, and black perspectives. Katherine McKittrick traces the geographies of black women across the diaspora, arguing...

In July 1997, twenty-five of America's most influential journalists sat down to try and discover what had happened to their profession in the years between Watergate and Whitewater. What they knew was that the public no longer trusted the press as it once had. They were keenly aware of the pressures that advertisers and new technologies were putting on newsrooms around the country. But, more than anything, they were aware that readers, listeners, and viewers — the people who use the news —...

In October 1993, Robert Latimer, a Saskatchewan farmer, decided to end the life of his chronically ill daughter rather than subject her to another painful surgery. Tracy, who had the mental capacity of a five-month-old infant, was twelve at the time of her death. She had already endured multiple operations to correct conditions caused by her severe cerebral palsy.Tracy's death and the charge of murder laid against Robert Latimer set in motion Canada's most famous and controversial ...

**New York Times BestsellerNew York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice"An essential and groundbreaking text in the effort to understand how American criminal justice went so badly awry." —Ta-Nehisi Coates, author of Between the World and Me**In A Colony in a Nation, New York Times best-selling author and Emmy Award–winning news anchor Chris Hayes upends the national conversation on policing and democracy. Drawing on wide-ra...

In A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, John W. Whitehead charts America's transition from a society governed by "we the people" to a police state governed by the strong arm of the law. In such an environment, the law becomes yet another tool to oppress the people. As a constitutional attorney of national prominence, and as president of The Rutherford Institute, an international civil liberties organization, Whitehead has been at the forefront of the fight for civil ...

Named a Best Book of the Year by Kirkus ReviewsA New York Times Editor’s ChoiceNautilus Award Winner“A worthy and necessary addition to the contemporary canon of civil rights literature.” —*The New York Times***From one of the leading voices on civil rights in America, a thoughtful and urgent analysis of recent headline-making police brutality cases and the systems ...

A provocative and timely collection of essays from a celebrated cultural critic on race, diversity, and resegregation."The Smartest Book of the Year" ( The Washington Post)In these provocative, powerful essays acclaimed writer/journalist Jeff Chang ( Can't Stop Won't Stop, Who We Be) takes an incisive and wide-ranging look at the recent tragedies and widespread protests that have shaken the country. Through deep reporting w...

In 1787, British philosopher and social reformer Jeremy Bentham conceived of the panopticon, a ring of cells observed by a central watchtower, as a labor-saving device for those in authority. While Bentham's design was ostensibly for a prison, he believed that any number of places that require supervision—factories, poorhouses, hospitals, and schools—would benefit from such a design. The French philosopher Michel Foucault took Bentham at his word. In his groundbreaking 1975 study, Disc...

Professor Raymond Wacks is a leading international expert on privacy. For more than three decades he has published numerous books and articles on this controversial subject. Privacy is a fundamental value that is under attack from several quarters. Electronic surveillance, biometrics, CCTV, ID cards, RFID codes, online security, the monitoring of employees, the uses and misuses of DNA, - to name but a few - all raise fundamental questions about our right to privacy. This Very Short Introducti...

What it means when media moves from the new to the habitual—when our bodies become archives of supposedly obsolescent media, streaming, updating, sharing, saving.New media—we are told—exist at the bleeding edge of obsolescence. We thus forever try to catch up, updating to remain the same. Meanwhile, analytic, creative, and commercial efforts focus exclusively on the next big thing: figuring out what will spread and who will spread it the fastest. But what do we mis...

Social media compile data on users, retailers mine information on consumers, Internet giants create dossiers of who we know and what we do, and intelligence agencies collect all this plus billions of communications daily. Exploiting our boundless desire to access everything all the time, digital technology is breaking down whatever boundaries still exist between the state, the market, and the private realm. Exposed offers a powerful critique of our new virtual transparence, reveal...