You may have heard of Telosa, the sustainable city planned for the US desert, of NEOM, a Saudi Arabian futuristic mega-city, or of Japan's national Super City policy, which aims to integrate smart technology into all aspects of life.
As the new Canada Research Chair in Critical Surveillance and Security Studies, Dr. David Murakami Wood will lead a research team that explores examines how smart-city technologies and state-corporate ideologies intertwine.
A Full Professor in the Department of Criminology, Faculty of Social Sciences, and a Faculty member of the Centre for Law, Technology and Society, Dr. Murakami Wood is an interdisciplinary specialist in surveillance, security and technology from a global urban perspective, working mainly in Canada, Japan, the UK and Brazil.
The project, called “Platform Cities in an Age of Planetary Surveillance”, will include an examination of the role of surveillance in the Anthropocene, an environment in which planetary urbanism, AI and global crises shape our world. They will also explore the future of security, the role of national security agencies in planetary politics, and the impact of the climate crisis on surveillance. The goal of this research is to transform policy and public discourse through academic publications, policy engagement, fiction and films.
This new Canada Research Chair in Critical Surveillance and Security Studies and its team will be hosted at and supported by the University of Ottawa Centre for Law, Technology and Society, Canada’s leading research hub on technology law, ethics and policy, that host three other Canada Research Chairs and four University Research Chairs. This new chair will enhance the Centre’s leadership and global footprint, and, building on existing collaboration , Dr. Murakami-Wood will be able to leverage the Centre’s policy network and expertise in knowledge mobilization that will complement their global network.
The Canada Research Chairs Program invests to attract and retain some of the world’s most accomplished and promising minds. Chairholders aim to achieve research excellence in engineering and the natural sciences, health sciences, humanities, and social sciences.
Educated at Oxford and Newcastle, UK, Dr. Murakami Wood joined the University of Ottawa in 2022 from Queen’s University at Kingston where he was Director of the Surveillance Studies Centre, and Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology, and a former Canada Research Chair (Tier II) in Surveillance Studies.
He is a leading organizer in the field of surveillance studies as co-founder and now co-editor-in-chief of the international, open access, peer-reviewed journal, Surveillance & Society, co-founder and a current director of the Surveillance Studies Network, co-editor of Surveillance Studies: A Reader (Oxford University Press, 2018), Big Data Surveillance and Security Intelligence (UBC Press, 2021), and the forthcoming International Handbook of Surveillance Studies (Edward Elgar).
Congratulations to Dr. Murakami Wood!