What is it about?
How does state surveillance impact on social relatedness, everyday relations and knowledge production within university spaces? This article examines the ways in which the deployment of state security agents reconfigure everyday life and knowledge production on campus.
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Why is it important?
My findings reveal that state surveillance impacts fundamentally on the dailiness of life, interactions and processes of teaching and learning as well as the broader politics of knowledge production. The article also argues that the deployment of state security agents creates a culture of suspicion and self-censorship which has implications on knowledge production. This state surveillance also challenges us to rethink the idea of a university as a space of free inquiry and autonomy epitomised by academic freedom.
Perspectives
I think this article makes an important contribution to the political economy of surveillance and raises critical questions about what it means to work and learn under surveillance and challenges us to rethink and contests essentialist and dominant ideas about what a university is and should be.
Simbarashe Gukurume
University of Cape Town
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Surveillance, Spying and Disciplining the University: Deployment of State Security Agents on Campus in Zimbabwe, Journal of Asian and African Studies, March 2019, SAGE Publications,
DOI: 10.1177/0021909619833414.
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