Surveillance and Society Special Issue: Surveillance and Literature
Due Date: 01-01-2025
Submission deadline: 1 January 2025 for publication September 2025
This special issue asks: what does literature, and the study of literature, offer our shared understanding of surveillance? And what can literature tell us about surveillance and its entanglement with the arts?
Creative literature offers a number of resources for representing surveillance and experiences of surveillant environments and systems that other media, including other forms of surveillance art, lack. This makes literature that depicts surveillance an essential complement to other genres of surveillance-focused media. This proposed issue asks what literature, across a range of genres, including fiction, creative nonfiction, memoir, and poetry, contributes to our understanding of historical and contemporary surveillance practices. Does literature help us historicize the trajectories that brought us to our surveillance-saturated present? And, more broadly, what might the many methodologies developed in and adjacent to literary studies afford surveillance studies in terms of analytic tools?
Literature’s ability to represent the sensorium as a whole and as its aggregate parts allows this proposed issue to shift emphasis from the visual to other registers (the auditory, the affective, the tangible or corporeal, the psychological), augmenting the well-developed language through which we theorize the visual with new ways of thinking surveillant encounters. The issue aims to balance the study of contemporary and historical literature across a range of genres, including fiction, poetry, and life-writing, to consider the following ambitious inventory of questions:
- How does literature narrate surveillance experiences?
- How does literature help us parse the social, political, and ideological contexts in which surveillance emerges?
- How does literature stage encounters between the watchers and the watched?
- How does literature afford different registers or frameworks for interrogating surveillance than other, perhaps more visual or less narrative, media? What strategies does it share registers with these media?
- Which concepts or methodologies from surveillance studies are particularly productive for the analysis of literature?
Submission Information
The issue welcomes full academic papers, opinion pieces, and review pieces. We do not anticipate including creative work. We especially encourage early career researchers and scholars from outside North American and Europe to submit. The language of contributions must be English, but we welcome pieces on literature originally published in any language.
Submissions will undergo a peer review and revision process prior to publication. Submissions should be original work, neither previously published nor under consideration for publication elsewhere. All references to previous work by contributors should be masked in the text (e.g., “Author, 2024”).
We anticipate publishing this issue in September 2025. All papers must be submitted for consideration through the online submission system no later than 1 January 2025.
Please submit the papers in a MS Word–compatible format. For further formatting information, please consult the Surveillance and Society submission guidelines.
For all inquiries regarding the issue, please contact the guest editor: Steph Brown. View the full call for papers.