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 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.

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

Types of Surveillance

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

The subcodes Price included under Space were:
- Ambient uncertainty
- Arrangement of bodyminds or objects in a space
- Designated physical or online space
- Metaphorical space
- Mobility in space  (both physical and digital)
- Past or future spaces
- Surveillance in space (both physical and digital)
- Space- Other

Space Subcodes

Price, M. (2024). Crip Spacetime. Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478059370

Price (2024) Crip Spacetime

Annamma, Subini A., David J. Connor, and Beth A. Ferri, eds. 2016. DisCrit: Disability Studies and Critical Race Theory in Education. New York: Teachers College Press

DisCrit: Disability Studies and Critical Race Theory in Education

Ben-Moshe, Liat. 2020. Decarcerating Disability: Deinstitutionalization and Prison Abolition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Decarcerating Disability: Deinstitutionalization and Prison Abolition

Foucault, Michel. 1977. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Pantheon. 

Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison

Price posits that harm is an essential part of how space has been constructed in academia and that those who exist in crip spacetime move through spaces that have been built in and through harm and experience harm in spaces that is created through space's interaction with history, relations, objects, and geometries. 

Space and Crip Spacetime

Price notes that in Disability Studies, mobility refers to whether an individual's bodymind moves in a particular way, for instance walking or rolling. Mobility is also used in disability studies as a category, for instance mobility disability.

Mobility in Disability Studies

Intertwining of Space and Surveillance

Some participants noted that there was a sense of risk or vulnerability around disability that came from a sense of general opinion of people within the institution coming from features of the space around them, rather than any single instance of something being said or done to them.

Ambient Uncertainty

Tanya Titchkosky points out that academic spaces that harm disabled people are not often made with the expressed intent of being harmful to disabled people - rather, they have been organized by the possibility of not perceiving how the situations are harmful. In an organized possibility of not perceiving harm - e.g. not having a door large enough for a wheelchair user - the harm is not intended, but the environment is set up in a way where the harm is not readily perceived by those not experiencing it. Price notes by foregrounding harm we can work to undo this organized possibility of not perceiving.

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