This paper addresses the repositioning of youth ‘as’ risk, as well as ‘at’ risk (Giroux, 2009), an arguably relatively recent phenomenon across western Europe and the US.

The paper provides a case study of new surveillance technologies in secondary schools in the UK, and innovatively considers the implications of school surveillance for notions of citizenship, social justice and participatory democracy.

The new surveillance technologies include extensive Closed Circuit TV (CCTV) monitoring, screening technologies, tracking devices and biometric tools.  Across Europe and the US, to a greater or lesser extent, recent years have seen an explosion of new surveillance technologies such as CCTV, installed in the wider community. Although there has been much discussion around new technologies in general, as an educational phenomenon, there has been some limited research in US schools, but surveillance in UK schools is only just beginning to receive media and academic attention (Hope,2005, 2009). This is the first study of the wider implications of such extensive surveillance.

Schools have long engaged in observational practices such as physical observation, attendance registers, dress codes and behaviour policies, and tests, but previous monitoring practices did not have the capacity, reach and speed attributed to contemporary technologies (Lyon, 2007). The ostensible impetus for the installation of new surveillance devices in schools includes protection from the external threat of ‘dangerous others’ e.g. in the Scottish primary school massacre (Dunblane 1996), from internal threats e.g. knife crime, and reasons of health and personal safety, including the reduction of bullying, theft, smoking and truancy.

The paper contextualises the issue of increased surveillance in schools by exploring the tension between the dual social and political functions of schooling in the European nation state: on the one hand, social control and the engineering of social change; on the other, opportunities for social mobility, personal and cultural development and the conditions for democratic freedoms.

Key research questions include:

·         How do students negotiate the new surveillance devices?

·         Do the new technologies have an impact which previous surveillance techniques did not?

·         What are the implications of such extensive surveillance for notions of citizenship, social justice and participatory democracy?

Theoretical Framework

Data is analysed using the work of Foucault (1977) and his discussion of the panopticon and theories of self-surveillance.  Judith Butler’s (1993, 1997, 2004) work on the discursive and performative constitution of identities is used to explore the way in which discourses around notions of surveillance and control shape the roles and identities of students and staff, and for investigating the notion of resistance to surveillance through discursive agency.

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