Talk to focus on surveillance studies

One of the world's leading experts on surveillance studies will speak on the topic "Between Homeland Security and Facebook: Security Studies Today" at OU Thursday, Nov. 4, at 4 p.m., in the Oakland Center Gold Rooms.

Professor David Lyon is Research Chair in Sociology and Director of the Surveillance Studies Centre and the New Transparency Project at Queen’s University, Kingston Canada. Among his many accomplishments, Lyon is a founding editor of the e-journal Surveillance and Society (http://www.surveillance-and-society.org/ojs/index.php/journal ), an international and interdisciplinary journal dedicated to surveillance studies and has particular research interests in national ID cards, aviation security and surveillance and in promoting the cross-disciplinary and international study of surveillance.

Lyon has been working on surveillance issues since the 1980s, when he discussed surveillance as one of the key issues of information-based societies in The Information Society: Issues and Illusions (Polity 1988). Since then he has been involved in many debates over information politics and policy in Canada and around the world as a result of his research and publications.

His latest books are Identifying Citizens: ID Cards as Surveillance (Polity 2009), Playing the Identity Card (co-edited with Colin J. Bennett, Routledge, 2008) and Surveillance Studies: An Overview (Polity 2007). He is also the Principal Investigator of the New Transparency Project and holds a Killam Research Fellowship 2008-2010.

This visit is part of the College of Arts and Sciences 2010 Borders and Frontiers program and hosted by the cross-disciplinary faculty learning committee, SurPriSe, which formed in 2009 to foster interdisciplinary approaches to understanding surveillance, security and privacy through curricular development and research. The talk is also sponsored by the Center for Integrated Business Research and Education at OU's School of Business Administration.