The social impact of surveillance in three UK schools: ‘Angels’, ‘devils’ and ‘teen mums’

Abstract

Drawing upon the preliminary findings of a broader ESRC-funded project on the ‘surveilled’, this paper examines the social impact of ‘new surveillance’ technologies on the lives of school children living in a Northern City. We conducted fifteen one-hour ‘focus groups’ with eighty-five 13 to 16 year-old children in three schools. The pupils were asked a range of questions designed to document their awareness, experience and response to ‘surveillance’ as ‘school children’, but also as ‘regular citizens’ going about their business ‘outside’ of the school. We show how children’s experience and response to surveillance varies across ‘social positionings’ of class and gender, before going on to discuss the implications of our findings for the major theoretical debates on surveillance.