This Is a Secret: Learning From Children’s Engagement With Surveillance and Secrecy

Abstract

This article establishes the relevance of surveillance and secrecy as methodological tools, and it substantiates the argument that surveillance and secrecy are not oppositional in character, but overlap. It does so by drawing attention to obvious, but scholarly neglected performers of secrecy and surveillance: children. It discusses what it means to “work with” surveillance and secrecy as it develops their relevance in case studies involving children. As a contribution to cultural studies, the article shows how surveillance and secrecy “get to work” by tracing their constitutive character and by providing new angles for understanding points of contact between the two.