Research Coffee with Alexei Anisin, Ph.D.

Research Coffee is a series of events aimed to be a platform for discussions about publications, projects, and working papers of AAU Faculty as well as AAU students. Prior registration is required for this event.

Our next session will be hosted by Dean of the School of International Relations & Diplomacy, Alexei Anisin, Ph.D. who will present his work “Tracking and Tracing COVID-19 and the Solidification Surveillance Capitalism”. Jacob Maze, Ph.D. will join us as the discussant of the paper.

You can find the abstract of the paper below, but to receive the full paper and the link to the meeting, please register in advance. We look forward to seeing you!

Abstract: The COVID-19 pandemic transformed social, political, economic, and cultural structures. It fostered among the largest and most wide reaching restrictions on movement in human history. Likewise, quarantines were accompanied by massive surveillance over civilians in liberal democratic contexts such as the European Union wherein national governments coordinated with Brussels as well as telecommunication corporations to gather data, track, trace, and monitor populaces. This study utilizes a theoretical approach drawn from the Essex School of Ideology and Discourse Analysis (IDA) and investigates these processes through paying attention to discourses that were used to justify what arguably was the largest and most wide reaching manifestation of state-led surveillance in history. Focus is placed on speeches carried out by high ranking officials EU officials from the European Commission. The inquiry reveals that antagonistic language was used to justify the tracking and tracing of civilians, the enforcing of executive actions via soft laws, and the articulation of new identities based around the vaccinated and non-vaccinated. The implications of this analysis entail that Zuboff’s surveillance capitalism has undergone a transfiguration into an advanced form and has fused into state security apparatuses.