Policing the Poor: The Social Construction of Biometrics

Guest speaker Dr. Shoshana Magnet, professor of Women's Studies at the University of Ottawa and current SSHRC and Tomlinson postdoc in the Department of Art History and Communications Studies at McGill University.

This presentation examines the application of biometric technologies to welfare. In a comparative investigation of the trend toward the use of biometrics to identify welfare recipients in both the US and in Canada, Magnet interrogates the scientific gaze of the state in order to problematize the development of new technologies able to visualize criminality through the scrutiny of poor women’s bodies.

In order to avoid the technologically deterministic claim that biometric imaging technologies have developed independent of their cultural context, she grounds their expanded use in the increase in policing tactics against people of colour and poor Americans and Canadians -a state of affairs that has intensified with the gradual dismantling of the New Deal. While it is common to begin an examination of the expansion of surveillance technologies following September 11, 2001, Magnet demonstrates that technologies of surveillance and criminalization were in widespread use in both countries a full ten years earlier, as part of the continuing national project to regulate those receiving assistance from the state.