Aaron Santesso, associate professor in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication, was invited to a one-day symposium in New York, “Surveillance: What’s the Harm?” sponsored by the ACLU, Pen/America, and Fordham University’s Center for National Security.

The symposium was attended by approximately two dozen of the world’s leading experts on surveillance from fields including law, journalism, corporate technology, and the arts. It culminated in a standing-room only public forum, featuring, among others, Glenn Greenwald, James Bamford, Ariel Dorfman, and Bruce Schneier.

Santesso is co-author, with David Rosen (Trinity College), of The Watchman in Pieces: Surveillance, Literature, and Liberal Personhood (Yale, 2013). Professors Santesso and Rosen, who also attended, were the sole representatives of the humanities, and spent much of the day putting present debates into historical perspective. They made the case for understanding surveillance as divided between two distinct activities: observing people in order to predict future events, and observing people in order to control their behavior. This division of surveillance into two modes – “empathy and coercion” – is central to the argument of their recent book. Santesso and Rosen further argued that coercive surveillance is of particular concern in cases where the lines between public and private (especially corporate) activity are blurred. The area of greatest danger – which they will continue to examine in their ongoing work – involves the uses of surveillance technology in education.