Price notes that software that uses artificial intelligence algorithms to surveil students, including the honor lock softwares that claim to be able to detect academic dishonesty through students' hand and eye movements while taking a test, have been found to systematically disadvantage users of color, because of how the tools are often not trained on users with various skin tones, and disabled users, for instance be detecting fidgeting or stimming as "cheating."

Algorithmic Surveillance and Bias

Price provides a couple - non disability specific - examples of surveillance in academia including, how lecture halls are set up so lecturers can monitor the attentiveness of students, how e-proctoring systems like honor lock and go gaurdian are increasingly being used to remotely and algorithmically surveill students, to how many universities require biometric screening is used by universities to give certain individuals decreased rates on university provided health insurance. Price notes data from these forms of surveillance can be retained by the university for years.

Price notes that space and surveillance often overlap, especially in academia, where academic institutions have historic and thematic ties to carceral institutions.

Intertwining of Space and Surveillance

One example offered by Price of how space and surveillance overlap is the panopticon, a concept but forth by philosopher Jeremy Bentham, where prisons would be circular with a single guard tower in the middle with one way glass so that many prisoners could be watched by one guard but that the prisoners would not see the guard. Foucault later noted that the point of how the panopticon is designed was not that the guard could be watching all prisoners, but that the prisoners never knew if they were being watched so the space of the panopticon would lead to prisoners self-surveilling their own behavior.

The Panopticon

Price, M. (2024). Crip Spacetime. Duke University Press.

Crip Spacetime

Examples of Space and Surveillance in Academia

Price notes that the code for surveillance came about through a conversation with Addison Torrance, a research assistant who helped with developing data codes, in 2020 after Addison noted that several interviewees were self-scrutinizing their own disability, scrutinizing whether their own accommodations were reasonable, or doubting their own validity in claiming disability. This led to the development of both the surveillance code but also the code under Cost about self-scrutiny.

Surveillance and Self-Scrutiny

Price notes that biocertification is often used as a tool of surveillance of disabled individuals in academia - whether it is requirements that individuals obtain supporting documentation for accommodations claims, letters from doctors to justify leaves of absence, or detailed accounts of pain and inability to justify disability states, disabled people are often asked to prove disability status through biocertification.

Biocertification and Surveillance

Price notes that there are two types of surveillance discussed by participants in interviews - 
1. Investigative Surveillance
2. Compelled Surveillance

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