Alanur Çavlin-Bozbeyoğlu
Sami Coll
Alanur Çavlin-Bozbeyoğlu
2009-2011, Surveillance Studies Centre, Queen's University
Alanur Çavlin-Bozbeyoğlu is a postdoctoral fellow at the Surveilance Studies Centre. Her major interest is state surveillance related to data gathering systems - namely population censuses, registration systems and identification systems - and their relationship with neoliberal transformation and citizenship regimes.
Alanur's research includes a post-doctoral project on population censuses and registration system, funded by the Turkish Academia of Sciences. She is also coordinating research activities for an OPC project titled ‘The Private Sector, National Security and Personal Data: An assessment of private sector involvement in airport and border security in Canada’.
Following her B.S. in Sociology (Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey), Alanur gained her M.A. and PhD degrees in Demography (Hacettepe University Institute of Population Studies, Ankara, Turkey). She has taught several courses in demography and social policy.
Alanur's current work include articles on electronic ID card systems, census questionnaires, registration systems, ethnic/religious minorities’ presentation and monitoring, and camera surveillance in Turkey.
She can be reached at acb@queensu.ca.
2011, Surveillance Studies Centre, Queen's University
Dr Sami Coll is a postdoctoral fellow funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation. He began his career as an engineer in computer science before changing his professional orientation to Sociology. He defended his PhD in Sociology at the University of Geneva in 2010 and spent one year as a postdoctoral fellow at the City University of New York before joining the Surveillance Studies Centre in April 2011.
In his PhD research, he focused on consumer surveillance and loyalty cards (also known as consumer cards, club cards, rewards cards, points cards, savings cards or advantage cards). The main idea was to study consumption as a new form of social control which tries to govern people in a subtle and soft way, providing rewards for compliance rather than threats of potential punishment for non-compliance. Thus, he focused on subtle forms of surveillance, which are not felt as such by citizens/users/consumers, rather than its explicit forms (e.g. CCTV), where visibility is on the contrary meant to change people’s behaviour. The research also empirically challenged the notion of privacy, considering it as inefficient or even as becoming a part of surveillance. Finally, he argued that consumer surveillance can be seen in many ways as biopower, particularly when governments become interested in the data collected by companies to govern their bodies, e.g. trying to fight against obesity.
Alongside working on the publication of the results of his last research, he is preparing new research on social networks. This new project objective seeks to go beyond the usual surveillance-privacy antagonism and to study how the enhanced and wanted transparency of the subject affects social interactions, life chances and social structures.
For more information about his research, biography and publications, please visit his personal website: http://www.samicoll.com.
