Suchergebnisse

State surveillance programs often operate in direct tension with ideals of democratic governance and accountability. The fraught history of surveillance programs in the United States, for instance, illustrates that government agencies mobilize discourses of exceptional circumstances to engage in domestic and foreign spying operations without public awareness or oversight. While many scholars, civil society groups, and media pundits have drawn attention to the propensity of state surveillance programs to violate civil liberties, less attention has been given to the complex trust dynamics of state surveillance. On one hand, in justifying state surveillance, government representatives claim that the public should trust police and intelligence communities not to violate their rights; on the other hand, the very act of engaging in secretive surveillance operations erodes public trust in government, especially when revelations about such programs come to light without any advance notice or consent. In order to better understand such trust dynamics, this paper will analyze some of the competing trust relationships of Department of Homeland Security (DHS) 'fusion centers,' with a focus on the role of these organizations in policing the Occupy Wall Street movement of 2011 and 2012.

Suspicious activity reports (SARs) are an increasingly important tool in the law-enforcement repertoire, especially for counterterrorism. In spite of significant problems with such reports, they are experiencing a resurgence that can be attributed partly to the institutionalization of Department of Homeland Security (DHS) "fusion centers," which are taking the lead in vetting and interpreting these reports as they enter into law-enforcement and counterterrorism databases. Based on a 3-year study of DHS fusion centers, this article reviews a range of problems with SARs and argues that robust community relationships are necessary to achieve contextually situated reports that eschew overt forms of bias.

In this paper, we suggest that when undergraduate students are engaged as full teaching partners with professors in the college classroom, more liberatory and transformative educational spaces can be created. This paper is based on findings from a qualitative participatory study led by a team of six undergraduate students and one professor who engaged in a series of collaborative teaching endeavors (known as the Radical Teaching Assistant Project) at a small liberal arts college in the southern United States. Our findings suggest that positioning undergraduate students as co-teachers in college classrooms (a) fosters deeper student engagement through relatability, (b) creates more accessible and generative learning environments, (c) subverts knowledge hierarchies in the academy, (d) challenges dominant discourses and norms in the classroom, and (e) provides a space to engage in prefigurative politics. We also discuss some key challenges that arise through this model of collaborative teaching. Our findings suggest that students have much to offer college classrooms when they are central actors in designing course curricula and facilitating class sessions for their peers.