How do you study the impact of surveillance in over-scrutinized fields?

On 7 October 2022, Deradicalizing the City hosted its Advisory Board, that is composed of academics, artists and civil society figures. We decided to organize our meeting in an interactive manner. After a short update on all the different whereabouts of our researchers, we wanted to have a discussion with you about some of the epistemological and methodological challenges that are key to our project, and to think creatively with us about possible whereabouts.

            First, Farah Kassem - a doctoral student in art at Deradicalizing the City - presented an experimental film based on a discussion she had with a young Moroccan undocumented immigrant in Brussels. After setting up her audio recording device in a city park, she lived the experience of being targeted by those she wanted to interview (‘moving from being a hunter to being hunted’ in her own words). Children’s games and birds’ chirping form the soundscape of this encounter between the Lebanese director and her curious Moroccan interlocutor. A conversation ensues in Arabic about their shared experience of uprooting and loss. By reproducing only the sound –accompanied by English subtitles and surreptitiously by Farah's afterthoughts on the exchange –, the film questions notions of intimate and dictable. The discussion that followed among the members of the Advisory Board acknowledged this line of thought by questioning the ethical, epistemological and artistic underpinnings of Farah's work.

After this initial exchange, a discussion – first in smaller groups, then with all of the participants –  followed around the question of surveillance and research proposed upstream. All members of the Advisory Board were invited beforehand to engage with the following question: "How do you study the impact of surveillance in over-scrutinized fields?". Indeed, an important insight and starting point of our project is indeed the given that (a) studying surveillance is a sensitive topic and (b) we often do research in contexts where professionals, citizens etc. are ‘tired’ or distrustful of researchers. The mix of these two givens is – to say the least – quite challenging, and one of the central objectives of Deradicalizing the City is to think about ways of doing research otherwise. The different participants were able to share their personal or research experiences in social spheres subject to over-scrutinization. It led to rich and profound conversations regarding the ethics of research and engagement in such set-ups.