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Abstract
The aim of this paper is to explore critically the everyday conditions of surveillance in the contemporary secondary school context. Using a classical ethnographic approach, it seeks to unpack the range of surveillance practices and processes that are at work within schools as institutional settings, and how these are encountered and experienced by students, teachers, administrators, and other members of a school community. The main concern is with the hypothesized evolution of panoptic to post-panoptic surveillance and whether or not surveillance in schools emulates such developments, specifically with regards to the levelling of power hierarchies as a result of the incorporation of both vertical and horizontal modes of surveillance. To offer concrete examples of this shift in models of surveillance, this paper examine three manifestations of surveillance in schools: CCTV, mobile phones, and elearning and content management platforms as modes of dataveillance, a particularized form of surveillance that has come to characterize modern surveillance functions. The primary question that drives this research is what evidence is there for these functions/modes of surveillance, and how are digital technologies implicit in their operation?
Introduction
Surveillance has become an integral part of everyday life, giving rise to talk of "electronic police states" and the "surveillance society" (Ball et al. 2013; Lyon 1994; Marx 1985). The technique typically refers to actions that enable public and/or private agents to manage and control populations (Gandy 1993). Traditionally, surveillance has involved vertical forms of monitoring where more powerful actors exercise control over the less powerful. Recent technological developments, however, have increased instances of horizontal surveillance where it is argued that power hierarchies are more or less flattened. Here, individuals and groups gather information on each other through various interpersonal electronic techniques that are implicit in the use of popular digital media-not least social networks such as Facebook (Marwick 2012; Tokunaga 2011). Also prevalent in recent times is a range of self-surveillance processes and practices, where individuals deliberately monitor and manage their own actions and behaviours.
While digital surveillance in school is not a global phenomenon (it has been challenged legally in Germany, for instance), surveillance processes and practices are now a pervasive feature of many K-12 schools in Anglo-Saxon countries. Common forms of surveillance include CCTV (closed-circuit television), online monitoring...