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We are currently in the midst of a global pandemic with the spread of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19). While we do not know how this situation will unfold or resolve, we do have insight into how it fits within existing patterns and relations, particularly those pertaining to sociocultural constructions of (in)security, vulnerability, and risk. We can see evidence of surveillance dynamics at play with how bodies and pathogens are being measured, tracked, predicted, and regulated. We can grasp how threat is being racialized, how and why institutions are flailing, and how social media might be fueling social divisions. There is, in other words, a lot that our scholarly community could add to the conversation. In this rapid-response editorial, we provide an introduction to the framing devices of disease surveillance and discuss how a surveillance studies orientation could help us think critically about the present crisis and its possible aftermath.

This article explores the relationship between personal sacrifice and identity work within conditions of profound structural insecurity. We develop the concept of sacrificial labour to describe how individual self-sacrifice aligns workers’ identities to the needs of organizations while gradually foreclosing the actualization of individuals’ desired future selves. Drawing upon qualitative data from a longitudinal study of healthy individuals who enrol in paid clinical trials for the pharmaceutical industry, we make two contributions to the identity-work literature. First, we argue that the ongoing project of building stable and secure identities may become damaging when structural and cultural conditions defy even provisional, fragile attainment of this goal. Second, we reflect on how racialization and social marginalization erode identities and constrain possibilities for identity recuperation. Whereas the identity-work literature often focuses on the agential accomplishments of individuals, we provide a troubling account of how persistent social and economic inequalities confound identity realization efforts.

Threats of terrorism, natural disaster, identity theft, job loss, illegal immigration, and even biblical apocalypse—all are perils that trigger alarm in people today. Although there may be a factual basis for many of these fears, they do not simply represent objective conditions. Feelings of insecurity are instilled by politicians and the media, and sustained by urban fortification, technological surveillance, and economic vulnerability.Surveillance in the Time of Insecurity fuses advanced theoretical accounts of state power and neoliberalism with original research from the social settings in which insecurity dynamics play out in the new century. Torin Monahan explores the counterterrorism-themed show 24, Rapture fiction, traffic control centers, security conferences, public housing, and gated communities, and examines how each manifests complex relationships of inequality, insecurity, and surveillance. Alleviating insecurity requires that we confront its mythic dimensions, the politics inherent in new configurations of security provision, and the structural obstacles to achieving equality in societies.

There is limited research on healthy volunteers' perceptions of the risks of Phase I clinical trials. In order to contribute empirically to long-standing ethical concerns about healthy volunteers' involvement in drug development, it is crucial to assess how these participants understand trial risks. The objectives of this study were to investigate (1) participants' views of the overall risks of Phase I trials, (2) their views of the risk of personally being harmed in a trial, and (3) how risk perceptions vary across participants' clinical trial history and sociodemographic characteristics. We qualitatively and quantitatively analyzed semi-structured interviews conducted with 178 healthy volunteers who had participated in a diverse range of Phase I trials in the United States. Participants had collective experience in a reported 1,948 Phase I trials (mean = 10.9; median = 5), and they were interviewed as part of a longitudinal study of healthy volunteers' risk perceptions, their trial enrollment decisions, and their routine health behaviors. Participants' qualitative responses were coded, analyzed, and subsequently quantified in order to assess correlations between their risk perceptions and demographics, such as their race/ethnicity, gender, age, educational attainment, employment status, and household income. We found that healthy volunteers often viewed the overall risks of Phase I trials differently than their own personal risk of harm. The majority of our participants thought that Phase I trials were medium, high, or extremely high risk (118 of 178), but most nonetheless felt that they were personally safe from harm (97 of 178). We also found that healthy volunteers in their first year of clinical trial participation, racial and ethnic minority participants, and Hispanic participants tended to view the overall trial risks as high (respectively, Jonckheere-Terpstra, -2.433, p = 0.015; Fisher exact test, p = 0.016; Fisher exact test, p = 0.008), but these groups did not differ in regard to their perceptions of personal risk of harm (respectively, chi-squared, 3.578, p = 0.059; chi-squared, 0.845, p = 0.358; chi-squared, 1.667, p = 0.197). The main limitation of our study comes from quantitatively aggregating data from in-depth interviews, which required the research team to interpret participants' nonstandardized risk narratives. Our study demonstrates that healthy volunteers are generally aware of and reflective about Phase I trial risks. The discrepancy in healthy volunteers' views of overall and personal risk sheds light on why healthy volunteers might continue to enroll in clinical trials, even when they view trials on the whole as risky.

This paper analyzes the relationship between surveillance, violence, and dissent on university campuses in the United States. With a focus on administrative and police responses to pro-Palestinian protesters in particular, I show how surveillance facilitates selective, targeted discipline of students and faculty members expressing pro-Palestinian positions. I explore these dynamics with Colombia University’s police crackdown on protesters; University of California, Los Angeles’s tolerance for terror inflicted by vigilante counterprotesters; and the broader punishment and dismissal of professors voicing criticism of Israel’s war in Gaza. Considered as a whole, these examples reveal a larger cultural landscape that constructs pro-Palestinian groups as fundamentally dangerous, terrorist, and intolerant. Anti-Palestinian violence should be an expected outcome from such an ideological position. The examples also show how campus surveillance practices have shifted to emphasize anticipatory and reactive modalities. In the anticipatory register, surveillance is mobilized as a counterinsurgency tool for the preemptive interruption of pro-Palestinian speech; in the reactive register, surveillance is deployed to punish and terrorize individuals for their expressions of dissent. The reactive modality effectively folds into the anticipatory one by serving as a warning to others and exerting a chilling effect on future campus protests. I argue that universities extend racialized state violence through their surveillance practices and that they remain key players in the maintenance of the racial order.

This paper sketches some of the key dangers presented by the second Trump presidency. We are witnessing a mainstreaming of far-right positions with profound implications both for government and the constitution of society. This moment is marked by censorship and self-censorship of the media, surveillance and punishment of immigrant communities, attacks on higher education, throttled scientific research, a war on gender, the evisceration of government agencies, reduced checks on disinformation or hate speech, and threats to international security. The Trump model of governance builds on hate to breed instability and chaos. These are the dynamics we must confront and disarm.

This essay reflects on the many upheavals of the past year and their implications for critical scholarship on surveillance. The COVID-19 pandemic, anti-science policies, radicalized white supremacists, police killings of people of color, and the resurgence of the racial justice movement all inflect surveillance practices in the contemporary moment. In particular, today’s polarized political landscape makes it difficult to condemn surveillance in the service of the public good, but irrespective of one’s goals or intentions, the embrace of transparency carries its own risks. Transparency, and scientific vision more broadly, is an extension of the Enlightenment and subsequent scientific revolution, which from the start sought to advance knowledge and consolidate white power through the violent subjugation of nature, women, and racial minorities. One fundamental risk of valorizing transparency is that doing so occludes the ways that relations of domination are indelibly encoded into surveillance systems and practices. Given this, I argue that the project of decolonizing surveillance inquiry should now be our primary focus as a field.

Other than the financial motivations for enrolling in Phase I trials, research on how healthy volunteers perceive the benefits of their trial participation is scant. Using qualitative interviews conducted with 178 U.S. healthy volunteers enrolled in Phase I trials, we investigated how participants described the benefits of their study involvement, including, but not limited to, the financial compensation, and we analyzed how these perceptions varied based on participants’ sociodemographic characteristics and clinical trial history. We found that participants detailed economic, societal, and noneconomic personal benefits. We also found differences in participants’ perceived benefits based on gender, age, ethnicity, educational attainment, employment status, and number of clinical trials completed. Our study indicates that many healthy volunteers believe they gain more than just the financial compensation when they accept the risks of Phase I participation.

This special section of The Sociological Quarterly explores research on \"surveillance as cultural practice,\" which indicates an orientation to surveillance that views it as embedded within, brought about by, and generative of social practices in specific cultural contexts. Such an approach is more likely to include elements of popular culture, media, art, and narrative; it is also more likely to try to comprehend people's engagement with surveillance on their own terms, stressing the production of emic over etic forms of knowledge. This introduction sketches some key developments in this area and discusses their implications for the field of \"surveillance studies\" as a whole.