Peer Surveillance Research Articles

“All sisters must experience the endorphin rush!” A virtual discourse-ethnographic study on neoliberalism female fitness community on Bilibili

ABSTRACT Taking Bilibili as the analyzing platform, this study explores the linguistic and cultural features of neoliberalism female fitness communities on social media in China. By combining Discourse-Ethnographic Analysis (DEA), Corpus-assisted Discourse Analysis (CADA), and sentimental analysis, this study explores the construction of individual identities, societal values, and collective identities within these communities, as well as the ways in which members establish relationships and engage in fan-idol dynamics. The study reveals the presence of postfeminist biopedagogies, peer surveillance, and the formation of a fandom-centered discourse influenced by neoliberal and postfeminist values. Meanwhile, the use of terms like “sister” fosters pseudo-kin relationships, conveying both closeness and fellowship while challenging male-dominated societal norms. The findings contribute to understanding female fitness communities on social media, highlighting the construction of identity, relationships, and social values in digital spaces.

Planting in the pandemic: surveillance on social media

ABSTRACT This article looks at interest-driven and informal social media practices that have flourished in the pandemic period and its ensuing renaissance of domesticity. It investigates how tending plants and discussing them on social media serve as a particular site for connecting around loving and taking care of plants. Its focus is on the discursive means with which posters – guided by social media algorithms – rhetorically co-construct a morally acceptable version of a pandemic lifestyle around houseplants. More specifically, drawing on multimodal discourse studies, critical sociolinguistics and work on digital surveillance, it investigates how members of a Finland-based social media site observe and monitor themselves and others via their linguistically heterogeneous and multimodal posts. The paper demonstrates how constructions of tending plants highlight a normative subject who besides cultivating plants also cultivates themselves and others in the allegedly safe microcosm of the home, surrounded by the risk-ridden, tension-full, dangerous pandemic world. In the same way, as in many other types of informal and interest-driven social media activities, surveillance forms a crucial part of the routine digital activities and interactions about and around plants. Three manifestations of surveillance are discussed in detail: site-specific panoptic surveillance, peer surveillance and self-surveillance.

Muslim Youth Negotiating Boundary Maintenance Between the Sexes: A Qualitative Exploration

Studies on Muslim youth suggest that they experience difficulties with balancing Western culture and Islamic religious norms. This study focuses on boundary maintenance between the sexes, which entails physical or social distance and avoidance of touching and gaze. These aspects of everyday social life are imbued with much symbolic significance and value. The study examined the values and norms on this subject that Muslim youth were taught and socialized into at non-formal Islamic education settings, and then compared these with values and norms conveyed at secondary schools in the Netherlands. Due to its exploratory nature, the study adopted a qualitative approach. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 34 young adults and 28 students enrolled at secondary schools from four Muslim communities. The findings revealed that Muslim youth were taught and socialized into contradictory values and norms in these two learning contexts. While sex segregation was observed in non-formal Islamic education settings, participants’ mainstream schools were coeducational. Islamic ethos as practiced in this community required physical and social distancing between the sexes, avoiding male gaze, and refraining from physical touch. However, at schools, boys and girls were expected to work in groups, interact, discuss, and socialize, and handshaking with teachers before lessons was observed at some schools as a ritual. Moreover, the study explored four pathways Muslim youth adopted as they negotiated such competing values: conformity to religious values, code-switching, peer surveillance, and breaking away. The findings have implications for the social and cultural integration, mental health, and wellbeing of Muslim youth.

Racial harmony and sexual violence: Uneven regulation and legal protection gaps for influencers in Singapore

AbstractDrawing on a multi‐year ethnographic study of influencers in Singapore and analyses on frameworks regulating racial harmony and sexual violence, this paper adopts approaches from anthropology, cultural studies, and socio‐legal studies to illustrate how the law heavily regulates certain influencers while failing to protect others. This spans across governance from the “state” through government interventions and introduction of formal law, governance in the “industry” through sector‐based guidelines and best practice recommendations, and governance in the “vernacular” from peer surveillance and the court of public opinion in civil society. Through mixed qualitative methodologies including traditional and digital participant observation, content analysis, archival research, document survey, and case study files, this paper aims to locate the current terms and boundaries of influencer governance and regulation in the verticals of “race & culture” and “sex & safety.” In “race & culture,” we consider how the majority‐race Chinese influencers and minority‐race Malay and Indian influencers are differently policed by the three tiers of governance, and experience uneven consequences. This includes commentary that is overtly racist, poor stereotypes that perpetuate everyday racism, and parody content that calls out systemic racism. In “sex & safety,” we consider how sexual harassment and assault are regulated in the industry. This includes the underbelly of the industry where some prominent influencers‐cum‐managers have been accused of sexual grooming and advances as part of their recruitment processes. It highlights how when women are provided an anonymous space to discuss sexual harassment, a tidal wave of stories emerge, leading to doxxing and the potential for vigilante justice. It also reveals how LGBT influencers and sexual offenders are policed more harshly, while sexual harassment against women take place without repercussion even when revealed. We end with a consideration of the state of influencer wellbeing and welfare in the industry, and the place of the law in regulating longstanding and emergent issues.

Digital sexual citizenship and LGBT young people's platform use

Drawing on original interviews and digital ethnography conducted with 20 LGBT young people, and using critical platform studies and a design-centric approach, this paper demonstrates how platform use has enabled LGBT young people maintain sexual identity authenticity, normalise fluidity, reimagine community through allied algorithmic mediation, negotiate the threat of peer surveillance, and refuse platform norms so as to self-narrate gender affirmation, organise collective resources and repudiate the performance of online inauthenticity. This paper considers these practices as emergent acts of digital sexual citizenship that are becoming prevalent in countries with no sexual rights and argues that platform affordances furnish the infrastructure for LGBT young people to evade the state surveillance of homosexuality and find allied friendships, romantic partners and safe communities.

Smouldering pornographies on the Chinese internet

ABSTRACT Mainland Chinese pornographies on the internet and social media platforms have emerged amidst hardline strategies of government surveillance and censorship. This article examines a new tide of government-sponsored surveillance technologies regarding how they affect new sex and porn industries, which are systematically being closed down and leave the industry, on the whole, in a perpetually ‘smouldering’ state. The Chinese Communist Party has, since its inception, involved a ‘Mass Line’ [qunzhong luxian, 群众路线] style of governance, or ordered ‘the masses’ and peer communities to set up mechanisms to report on sexual behaviours and underground porn circuits. Steyerl predicted in 2013 that online peer surveillance globally would encourage a new era of ‘invisibility politics’ or a paradoxical thrust towards sexual self-expressivity and self-annihilation. To query this point, the article highlights the impact of peer surveillance on Chinese pornographies and erotica since 2009. It includes a discussion of contemporary live-streaming sex industries and features an interview with an employee from a tech company closed down in 2017. The article ends with a discussion with queer artist and pornographer Fan Popo about the crackdown on his own work and the difficulties in producing and defending pornography under mainland Chinese surveillance.

Managing experience co-creation practices: Direct and indirect inducement in pop-up food tourism events

Consumers performing the role of value-creators in experience co-creation introduces idiosyncrasies that challenge experiential consistency. Taking ‘pop-up’ dining events as its empirical focus, and drawing on semi-structured interviews with participants, this study examines how organisations and consumers interact to negotiate ambiguity, variability and consistency. The paper questions how organisers try to prescribe normative rules governing events. It considers how consumers invest in preparing for events, and engage in socialised performances to create unique experiences. The data are also used to show how peer surveillance shapes consumer expectations, behaviours and interpretations. Consequently, this study contributes to knowledge on the practical management of co-creation by conceptualising different pathways through which organisations and consumers attempt to orchestrate behaviours. Moreover, in theorising from the data, this paper distinguishes between direct and indirect modes of inducement used to achieve experiential outcomes, identifying how ‘value-signalling’ practices engage event stakeholders and shape their co-creation.

The chilling effects of algorithmic profiling: Mapping the issues

In this article, we provide an overview of the literature on chilling effects and corporate profiling, while also connecting the two topics. We start by explaining how profiling, in an increasingly data-rich environment, creates substantial power asymmetries between users and platforms (and corporations more broadly). Inferences and the increasingly automated nature of decision-making, both based on user data, are essential aspects of profiling. We then connect chilling effects theory and the relevant empirical findings to corporate profiling. In this article, we first stress the relationship and similarities between profiling and surveillance. Second, we describe chilling effects as a result of state and peer surveillance, specifically. We then show the interrelatedness of corporate and state profiling, and finally spotlight the customization of behavior and behavioral manipulation as particularly significant issues in this discourse. This is complemented with an exploration of the legal foundations of profiling through an analysis of European and US data protection law. We find that while Europe has a clear regulatory framework in place for profiling, the US primarily relies on a patchwork of sector-specific or state laws. Further, there is an attempt to regulate differential impacts of profiling via anti-discrimination statutes, yet few policies focus on combating generalized harms of profiling, such as chilling effects. Finally, we devise four concise propositions to guide future research on the connection between corporate profiling and chilling effects.

Designed for Threat: Surveillance, Mass Shootings, and Pre-emptive Design in School Architecture

Contemporary political discourse around security, immigration, and terrorist threat manifests in two trends in educational architectural: the fortress school and surveilled flow. The fortress grows out of the urban-renewal movement of the post-World War II era, particularly on American university campuses. This architecture pre-empts threat by clamping down and fortifying its peripheral walls while controlling, surveilling, and limiting the number of entrances. Lockdown procedures, encouraging surveillance among citizens, metal detectors, increased police presences, and data-mining are all tactics at the fortress’ disposal. The alternative, much newer approach pre-empts threat by surveilling flow; that is, inviting people inside the structure and encouraging traffic while relying on more remote and less obvious tactics for detecting undesirables, such as closed-circuit television (CCTV), data-mining, and, like the fortress model, encouraging peer surveillance. Surveilled flow maintains the gesture of openness; however, this is mainly aesthetic, as other methods of intrusive policing take place at less-visible levels. At the heart of both of these articulations of pre-emptive threat culture is the digital-age anxiety about the alignment and possible misalignment between visual and information-based citizen profiles: Does the student or visitor appear to be a threat? Does his or her online behavior indicate potential threat? The profusion of information in the digital age meets this more primal desire to commensurate the appearance of risk with other forms of information-based evidence of threat. Digital-era concerns about how to interpret a wealth of information at various institutional and cultural levels pervade the riskscape in the developed world, and educational architecture is but one manifestation.

Chilling Effects of Profiling Activities: Mapping the Issues

In this article, we provide an in-depth overview of the literature on chilling effects and corporate profiling and connect the two topics. We start by explaining how profiling, within an increasingly data-rich environment, creates substantial power asymmetries between users and platforms (and corporations more broadly). We stress the notion of inferences and the increasingly automatic nature of decision-making, based on user data, as essential aspects of profiling. We then discuss chilling effects in depth, connecting them to corporate profiling. In the article, we first stress the relationship and similarities between profiling and surveillance. Second, we illustrate chilling effects as a result of state and peer surveillance; we then show the interrelatedness of corporate and state profiling, and we finally spotlight the customization of behavior and behavioral manipulation as particularly outstanding issues in this discourse. We also explore the legal foundations of profiling through an in-depth analysis of European and US data protection law. We found that, while Europe has a clear regulatory framework in place for profiling, the US primarily relies on a patchwork of sector-specific or state laws. Besides, there is an attempt to regulate differential impacts of profiling, via anti-discrimination statutes, yet few policies focus on combating generalized, concrete harms of profiling, such as chilling effects. At the end of the article, we bring together the diverse strands of literature in concise propositions to guide future research on the connection between corporate profiling and chilling effects.

Gendered emotion work and the micro-practices of heterosexuality: Two middle-class teenage partner relationships

This paper uses close analysis of two couples to examine the micro-practices and processes of gendered power within middle-class young people's intimate partner relationships. It is based on in-depth interviews with 14–16 year old young people in an affluent area of England. The paper argues that intimate relationships can be spaces of intense pleasure, as well as providing a site of calm and escape from the peer surveillance of the broader social network. However, they can also be oppressive sites of constriction and control, and reproduction of traditional gendered narratives; in these couples, the young women were rendered responsible for the “emotion work”. The young women, though, often disavowed and downplayed inequalities, negotiating the contradictory and schizoid nature of contemporary girlhood.

Social Media, Peer Surveillance, Spiritual Formation, and Mission: Practising Christian Faith in a Surveilled Public Space

Social media has become a part of everyday life, including the faith lives of many. It is a space that assumes an observing gaze. Engaging with Foucauldian notions of surveillance, self-regulation, and normalisation, this paper considers what it is about social and digital culture that shapes expectations of what users can or want to do in online spaces. Drawing upon a wide range of surveillance research, it reflects upon what “surveillance” looks like within social media, especially when users understand themselves to be observed in the space. Recognising moral panics around technological development, the paper considers the development of social norms and questions how self-regulation by users presents itself within a global population. Focusing upon the spiritual formation of Christian users (disciples) in an online environment as a case study of a community of practice, the paper draws particularly upon the author’s experiences online since 1997 and material from The Big Bible Project (CODEC 2010–2015). The research demonstrates how the lived experience of the individual establishes the interconnectedness of the online and offline environments. The surveillant affordances and context collapse are liberating for some users but restricting for others in both their faith formation and the subsequent imperative to mission.

Student Perceptions of a New Campus Alcohol Policy: Linking Deterrence and Blame Attribution

How do students make judgments about their future behaviors involving the use of alcohol? The present study advances deterrence theory by introducing elements of attribution theory while examining the perceived deterrent effects of a newly instituted dry policy on a college campus. A phone survey of 508 full-time undergraduate students between the ages of 18 and 26 was conducted 1 year following the ban on alcohol. Hypotheses are presented in two models and predict that deterrence (surveillance and enforcement) and blame explain intentions to violate the alcohol policy. These relationships are expected to be mediated by problem attribution and shame and are moderated by gender. Results show that perceived peer surveillance does reduce intentions to violate the policy in the future but formal enforcement does not. Findings further indicate that attributing blame acts to increase the likelihood of experiencing shame, therefore, reducing intentions to violate the alcohol policy. Gender conditioned the effects of surveillance and shame (stronger for females) on future policy violations. Problems that arise from drinking can be understood as another form of attribution that acts to mediate surveillance. Surveillance and blame contribute to the judgment process as students think about violating the alcohol policy, and shame emerges as the key link between deterrence and attribution.

‘Why can’t they meet in bars and clubs like normal people?’: the protective state and bioregulating gay public sex spaces

ABSTRACTState regulation of gay public sex spaces (PSS) has prompted geographers to assess the influence that localised legalities exert in specific micro-spaces of interaction, and to expand this research into cities not considered to be archetypically ‘gay friendly’. Through the lens of Foucault’s governmentality, it is important to consider state-directed bioregulatory influences upon toilets and parks as PSS. Such bioregulation, with its aim of producing a ‘healthy’ sexual population, seeks to expose public sex as ‘dangerous’, encouraging a policing of PSS and the men who use them. Part of this bioregulation also enlists men using PSS as responsible for peer surveillance to ensure anonymity and privacy in PSS. This auto-surveillance develops a ‘common code of conduct’ leading these men to develop their own modes of ‘normativity’ within these hetero-challenging spaces. By consulting with men who use PSS, I unearth oral histories of how changing laws, policy and ‘mainstream’ attitudes towards PSS in Glasgow, Scotland, have impacted upon cruising and cottaging. This paper will provide a place-specific reading of gay urban sexscapes, exploring how state bioregulation encourages the creation of new gay practices, identities and geographies.

Cosmetovigilance: definition, regulation and use "in practice".

Cosmetovigilance is a recent concept. The term itself has just been indexed. It is a form of health public surveillance with a public health objective; it therefore differs from the surveillance carried out by industrialists, who aim at the safety of the product for commercial purposes, and differs from peer surveillance (Revidal-Gerda), whose purpose is medical. Cosmetovigilance concerns cosmetic products. The 2006 European resolution has laid the ground work for a cosmetovigilance system based on case notifications. As of 2013, the new European regulation requires that serious undesirable effects reported to the competent authority should be transmitted to the competent authorities of the other Member States and to the person responsible for the cosmetic product. Two problems are yet to be solved: causality assessment and reporting categories. Cosmetovigilance systems are genuine means of obtaining information on the safety of cosmetic products and their ingredients. They can be used by Europe to check that new directives ensure a high level of safety. Cosmetovigilance makes it possible to rule out or control potentially hazardous ingredients and can thus set our minds at ease about the products placed on the market.

When the Inmates Run the Asylum: Grief Play in the Virtual Panopticon of Second Life

In this article I sketch out how governance is negotiated through grief play in virtual worlds particularly when peer surveillance is involved. Characterizing virtual worlds as having legal pluralism determined by different stakeholders whose interests may or may not align, I argue that surveillance exists in a decentralized form which leads to the establishment of data powerhouses at the hands of unauthorized persons or groups. Using Second Life as an example, I demonstrate how these practices result in power asymmetries and abuses that allow player groups to gather intelligence for the purpose of gaining power in-world, thereby exacerbating conflict among player groups. It is in this political climate that griefing in Second Life developed from a set of practices including irreverent language and dicey pranks into a tactic used to negotiate power.

The Effect Of Job Enrichment Schemes On Selected Construction Workers In Nigeria

o. o. a i n a · t h e e f f e c t o f j o b e n r i ch m e n t s ch e m e s o n s e l e c t e d c o n s t r u c t i o n w o r ke r s i n n i g e r i a · pp 933 941 There is a need to ascertain the effect of job enrichment schemes on workers in construction industry in Nigeria in order to justify its continuous use as tools for motivation. This study was designed to determine the relative performance of job enrichment schemes used by selected construction firms in Lagos, Nigeria and the effects of the schemes on the workers in these firms. The study was conducted with data from questionnaire retrieved from forty two project sites. The project managers and craftsmen on these sites were required to evaluate the performance of the job enrichment schemes they had used previously and the effect of those schemes on the workers. Ranking of the Analytical Hierarchical Process (AHP) vectors used for performance evaluation revealed that high performing job enrichment schemes were increased decision making ability, total quality management and training programmes. Factor analysis was further used to extract the following factors as the major effects of the job enrichment schemes on the construction workers; core job enrichment effects, workers self actualization effects, peer surveillance effects, workers dissatisfaction effects, workers behavioural effects and positive time effects. The ascertained effects justify continuous use of job enrichment schemes. The Effect Of Job Enrichment Schemes On Selected Construction Workers In Nigeria

Making it Personal in a call centre: electronic peer surveillance

This paper analyses a form of electronic surveillance in a call centre that was not automatically performed through or by information and communication technology but required the active involvement of peers to provide feedback on each other's work by using an online reporting tool. Increased surveillance led to a tightening of control over certain aspects of work as advisors modified their call‐handling practices. But surveillance was simultaneously undermined by technical and bureaucratic control linked to existing information systems, which affected the ability and availability of peers to perform monitoring. Electronic peer surveillance was also unable to provide objective information or unobtrusive control as performing and evaluating surveillance became a highly political and contested process. Various forms of resistance arose, which were not always directed at management, but were instead manifest through increased animosity between teams.

Feminism and Video: A View from the Village

had fifteen students; fourteen of them were men — boys, really — and I was the one female. It was the only film production class at the entire university. The professor, Robert Gardner, was very much a man, an old-fashioned gentleman artist, a documentarian, alternately gallant to or oblivious of me — as was the general wont in those bygone days between older men and their female students, at least when no lechery was involved. Though hardly shy, I barely spoke, so sure was I that a mere question of mine would reveal the depth of my stupidity when it came to cameras. At the time, I probably thought that the gap in my comfort zone in the world — the mechanical and electronic — was genetic: women were inherent Luddites. We shot on Bolexes and edited on Movieolas. Since I was unable to speak in the class, I sat by the Charles River with the manuals, the camera, and the light meter for hours, trying out everything without peer surveillance. Student strikes against the war in Vietnam were key features of my film education. You often didn’t finish editing because you would not cross the picket line by the middle of spring semester (1968 – 70) to enter Feminism and Video: A View from the Village

Rebuilding Poland: Workers and Communists, 1945-1950 by Padraic s> Kenney (review)

REVIEWS 367 internallygenerated pressurefor group conformity remained as strong as in the 'official' milieu: each unofficial coterie thus tended to reproduce the tendency to total conformity on pain of oblichenie (unmasking)and expulsion without appeal. In general, Kharkhordin'sapplication of a Foucaultianmethodology pays off well. Foucault's major weakness, his uncertain sense of where power is located in any given society,is not a seriousone in analysingthe SovietUnion, since the locus of power there was so unambiguous. At the same time, the analysisof the provenance of the Soviet sense of individual and collective is fruitful.I would not, though, alwaysaccept the conclusionswhich Kharkhordin reaches. I doubt if confessionaland penitential practiceswere decisive in generating the Soviet mode of self-consciousness.The gap from the seventeenth century,when Orthodox practiceswere at theirmost distinctive,to the twentieth is simply too long. In any case, Protestantpractices differed even more from Catholic ones than the Orthodox did, so that the division into 'east'and 'west'fallsdown. I suspect that there were two sets of intervening variables to which Kharkhordindoes not give sufficientweight. One was the mode of decisionmaking in the village community, which continued without radical change right up to the I920S: under krugovaia poruka (mutualresponsibility)there was continual peer surveillance,strongpressurefor consensus and a tendency for persistent non-cooperators to be deprived of influence and ultimately ostracized. The other was the culture of the nineteenth century kruzhok and even more of the revolutionarycell, where ascetic, egalitarian,goal-oriented intellectualsexercised a high degree of mutual surveillancewhich resultedin frequent splits and expulsions. It was in this milieu that Lenin imbibed his sense of kul'tura and found his model foira futuremore humane society, which of course strongly influenced the concepts of successive Communist leaders and their propagandists. The results for Soviet society are well analysed in Robert Tucker, PoliticalCulture and Leadership in SovietRussia.fiom Leninto Gorbachev (Brighton, I987). I would add that Vladimir Makanin'snovel, The Green Baize Tablezith Decanter, which won the Booker Prize in I993, vividly portraysthe difficultyof extracting an individualpersonalityfrom the milieu of universal mutual surveillance. In spite of my reservations about its conclusions, this book offers an original and challenging reinterpretation of fundamental features of Soviet society, which makes it essential reading. Schoolof Slavonnic andEast EuropeanStudies GEOFFREY HoSKING UTinversitj' College London Kenney, Padraic. Rebuilding Poland. Workers and Communists, I945-I950. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY and London, 1997. xvii + 360 pp. Notes. Illustrations.Figures.Maps. Bibliography.Index. ?3I .50. WVITH the passage of time and the opening of archives after the fall of Communism new and more soundly based academic perspectives are emerging about many key issuesconcerning the establishmentof Communist 368 SEER, 79, 2, 200I rulein EasternEurope.Kenney'swell-documentedstudyrefutesboth extreme views Marxist-Leninistpropagandadepictinga heroicworkingclasssetting up People'spower in post-warPoland and the hardlinewesternpicture of the Red Army mechanically imposing Soviet rule over a sullen population. He tracesout a more complex and dynamic interpretation.By doing so he throws significantnew light and fleshes out the specific realities of the two stages of the establishment of Communist power in Poland as well as the subsequent Stalinist process of disciplining the working class and subordinating it to communistcontrol. Kenney presentstwo detailed, but highly contrasting,case-studiesof L6&d and Wroclaw in the I945-50 period. The former was Poland's main manufacturingcentre with a strongtraditionof workingclassorganizationas well as a complex inheritance of class and ethnic conflicts. Unlike heavily destroyed Wroclaw, L6d2's industrial infrastructure emerged relatively unscathed from the war to the extent that it was seriously considered as a possiblenew capital. Itspopulation had sufferedextremes of Nazi oppression as well as almosttotal annihilationin the case of the largeJewish community. Kenney shows how a new national homogeneity allied to older cultural traditions of working class pride and organization, especially in the textile factories,to produce long drawn-outstrikes,protestsand industrialresistance in L6d2. This was only broken by the Communist authorities after 1947 through the adoption of divisivepracticesof Stalinistlabour competition and resource-allocation as well as outright repression. Industrial politics in Wroclaw,a frontier-citywithin the Recovered Territories,was dominated by the expulsion of the Germans and their replacement by an inflow of Poles from the Eastern Territories lost to the USSR, demobilized veterans and varied individuals from all...