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Research Interests

• Surveillance and Social Sorting
• Big Data Surveillance
• Identification Regimes
• Privacy
• Information Technologies
• Christian Social Critique

David Lyon's research, writing, and teaching interests revolve around major social transformations in the modern world. Questions of the information society, globalization, secularization, surveillance, and debates over “post-” and “digital” modernity feature prominently in his work. Lyon was formerly an editor of Surveillance and Society and is Associate Editor of The Information Society. He also serves on the international editorial boards of several other journals. His books have been translated into eighteen languages: Arabic, Chinese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Farsi, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish, Swedish and Turkish.

Surveillance

Surveillance Studies has been Lyon’s major research area for the past 25 years. He brings a sociological perspective to bear on the issues raised by personal data processing in a database-dependent world. His surveillance interests include border and airport controls, social media, organizational routines, video camera surveillance, citizen registration and identification systems and social media. His concerns include, prominently, the social sorting capacities of contemporary surveillance, along with an exploration of their ethics and politics.

From the mid-1980s, Lyon's broad concerns prompted a critical examination of the much-hyped ‘microelectronics revolution’ that gave way to the so-called ‘information society.’ In the 1990s, Lyon focused his analyses on the social origins, incidence and consequences of processing personal data, arguing that surveillance has become a major dimension of modernity in its own right. This aspect of his research has expanded considerably, especially since 9/11, and involves extensive collaboration with colleagues and students. Surveillance is a globalized phenomenon, and Lyon's work focuses increasingly on the global south and on encouraging the development of Surveillance Studies networks around the world.

From 2008-2010 David Lyon was a Canada Council Killam Research Fellow, investigating the current rise of national ID card systems in a cross-national comparative perspective. The work complements some of his other studies of surveillance and contributes to both empirical and theoretical understanding of contemporary smart, biometrics-based ID systems.

Currently, Lyon is working towards a book on surveillance critique, Surveillance and the Eye of God.

Secularization

While he is best known for his work in Surveillance Studies, David Lyon’s research and writing span several other areas as well. Starting in Historical Sociology in the 1970s, his early work was on secularization processes – and the critique of some key theories -- in the modern world. Today, he tries to keep abreast of debates over the "post-secular" with an emphasis on the work of Charles Taylor. Following this, his main research directions explore other forms of social transformation that are both characteristic and constitutive of modernity.

As Director of the former Surveillance Studies Centre, Lyon worked with a multidisciplinary and international team on several related initiatives from primary research to theoretical development as well as associated media, policy and advocacy activities. The most recent team project was on “Big Data Surveillance” (‘BDS’ 2015-2020) and was funded by the SSHRC Partnership Grant program. It has streams on security, marketing and governance. Among other things, the project produced a major report Beyond Big Data Surveillance: Freedom and Fairness and an edited book, Big Data Surveillance and Security Intelligence: The Canadian Case, edited by David Lyon and David Murakami Wood (2022).

In 2005, Lyon was awarded a ���ϳԹ���Դ Research Chair in Surveillance Studies. In 2007 Lyon received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Sociological Association Communication and Information Technology Section and in 2008 he was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. In 2012 he received an Outstanding Achievement Award from the Canadian Sociological Association, in 2015 an Insight-Impact Award from the SSHRC and in 2016 an honorary doctorate from the Università della Svizzera Italiana in Switzerland. In 2017, Lyon received a Queen's University Award for Excellence in Graduate Supervision. And in 2020 Lyon was nationally recognized in Canada with the Molson Prize.

Research Interests

• Classical social theory
• The ontology of Being
• Modernity in the early twentieth century

Rob Beamish’s current research focuses on two unfinished projects related to the development of Marx’s ideas and the dissemination of his manuscripts. Those projects stem from one of Rob’s earliest publications, Marx, Method, and the Division of Labor (University of Illinois Press, 1992).

As a member of the advisory board for The Krader Project at McMaster University, Rob is also involved in research that builds on Lawrence Krader’s unpublished essays and his posthumously published, Noetics: The Science of Thinking and Knowing. Rob's main focus is an integration of Krader’s work in Noetics with the phenomenological perspectives of Schutz, Merleau-Ponty, and Arendt on the issues of perception, thinking, labour, and knowing.

Although he has written extensively on sport and the use of performance-enhancing substances in sport, Rob has returned his focus exclusively to themes and issues related to Marx’s and Krader’s manuscripts. Rob would welcome the opportunity to supervise students interested in the intensive study of Marx’s ideas or the work of Lawrence Krader.

Research Areas

Political ecology; climate change; agriculture and agrarian studies; labour and livelihoods; rural development

My research analyses the complex social and ecological forces that are reshaping contemporary agrarian regions in an era of political economic turbulence and climatic change. Working in the field of political ecology, I explore the dynamic interplay between government policies, food production, environmental change and rural livelihoods. My current SSHRC-funded research applies this approach to the transformation of rice production in contemporary Asia, including active field research in semi-arid India. Based on interviews with farmers, labourers, agricultural officers and policy makers, I examine how differential access to land, water, labour and credit shapes who can implement and benefit from new methods of rice intensification.

Prior to this project, my previous book, The Political Ecology of Climate Change Adaptation (Routledge 2015), provided the first systematic critique of the concept of climate change adaptation within the field of international development. Earlier published work explored themes in the political economy of development including labour and global commodity chains; labour markets, social policy and anti-poverty policies in Latin America; and the promises and pitfalls of microfinance as a development tool.

Supervision

I welcome graduate students interested in studying any aspect of the social, political and environmental forces shaping contemporary agriculture and the associated impacts upon food security and rural livelihoods.

Additionally, I continue to supervise widely in the areas of political ecology and political economy; labour in the global economy; livelihoods and anti-poverty poverty policies.

Research Interests

Science and Technology Studies; political economies of pharmaceutical knowledge and more broadly the political economy of knowledge

Sergio Sismondo does research in Science and Technology Studies at intersections of philosophy and sociology of science. Recently, he has been studying the nature and distribution of pharmaceutical research, seeing this as a project in the political economy of knowledge. He is at the beginning of a project on “epistemic corruption,” exploring contestation around knowledge practices. Earlier and continuing work has been connected to questions about realism, constructivism, and deflationism. Sismondo is currently editor of the journal Social Studies of Science, one of the flagship journals in Science and Technology Studies.

Research Interests

Global Political Economy; Urbanization and Displacements; Infrastructure; Global Finance and Debt; Global Governance; Business and Development

My research and teaching emphasis is on global political economy (GPE). As GPE is an interdisciplinary approach, I draw on Geography (Urban Studies), Politics (Comparative and International Relations), Sociology (Global Inequality), Gender Studies, and History to make sense of contemporary issues. In so doing, I have tried to debunk a commonly held belief that the economy is a technical issue best left to those with expert knowledge, i.e., economists. One way I achieve this objective is by exploring - both theoretically and empirically - the role of, and intersections between, states (regulation, laws, policies), people (workers, including precarious labour), and money (especially in the form of debt and financial markets). This allows me to interrogate questions of power (e.g., who the power, why the power, and with which consequences the power) as I investigate a range of topics such as: development finance, poverty, neoliberalism, debt (both consumer and sovereign), corporate governance, and global governance across a variety of geographies spanning North America, Western Europe, Latin America and South East Asia.

My previous book, Debtfare States and the Poverty Industry: Money, Discipline and the Surplus Population (2014), interrogates the social power of money and new forms of neoliberal (market-led) governance such as debtfarism. The latter involves rhetorical and regulatory (bankruptcy laws, usury laws, and consumer protection laws) interventions by states to facilitate the growing dependence of the poor on expensive credit to meet basic survival needs. In many ways, debtfarism has become a significant component of neoliberal (market-led) forms of governance in contemporary capitalism. I demonstrate this position by exploring several case studies ranging from credit cards to payday lending and the student loan industry in the United States to micro-lending techniques and low-income mortgages in Mexico.

I my latest book, Urban Displacements: Governing Surplus and Survival in Global Capitalism (2021), provides an empirically grounded analysis of rental housing insecurity in three urban geographies – Berlin, Dublin and Vienna – Debtfare and Displacement sharpens our understanding of the links between low-income rental tenure, neoliberal governance and financial capitalism. Homelessness has reached a crisis point in many European cities and is widely precipitated by the eviction of poor households from rental homes, due to insufficient or irregular income. This book argues that these trends are underpinned by the withdrawal of the state from social housing provisioning alongside the continued expansion of financial capitalism. Building from three signature case studies, the book demonstrates how cycles of overindebtedness, evictions and homelessness transform rental housing insecurity into entrenched urban poverty along class, gendered and racialized lines. In so doing, it provides a new analysis of how monetized power relations draw together landlords, creditors and the state to embed the urban poor more deeply within the financial logics of capitalism. As the book argues, both analytically and empirically, the outcome is the everyday facilitation and normalization of urban poverty and social marginalization.

Supervision

I particularly welcome applications from graduate students who are interested in conducting research in political economy approaches to various aspects of low-income housing and finance in either the global North or global South.

More generally, I am happy to supervise graduate students who are interested in conducting research on various topics listed above.

Since I hold two cross appointments, I am able to supervise PhD and MA students in the Department of Political Studies and the Department of Sociology.

Research Interests

Body; Health; Sport

Trained in cultural studies and sociology, I am an interdisciplinary scholar of the body, health and sport. I work with feminist, queer, and critical race theories to research a broad variety of topics ranging from drugs to food. My first book, Pink Ribbons, Inc: Breast Cancer and the Politics of Philanthropy, is the subject of an NFB documentary by the same name.

Research Interests

My research investigates everyday movement and recreation cultures as sites where relations of domination are both produced and resisted. Drawing on literatures and theories from feminist studies, cultural studies, and sport studies, and using a range of qualitative, interpretive, and historical methods, I explore embodiment, the meanings of movement, and the relationship between active bodies and their historical and cultural contexts. My current projects are concerned with: the political, environmental and cultural history of a municipal park; expressions of feminist and utopian ideals in recreational sports; and sexual harassment in sport coaching.