Monahan Torin and Rodolfo D. Torres' (eds.) Schools under surveillance: cultures of control in public education. New Brunswick, New Jersey, London: Rutgers University Press. 264 pp. $24.95 (US), Paperback. ISBN: 978-0-8135-4680-3

Ragnedda, Massimo

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Ragnedda, Massimo. 2010. Review of Monahan and Torres’ (eds.) Schools Under Surveillance. 
Surveillance & Society 7(3/4): 356-7. http://www.surveillance-and-society.org | ISSN: 1477-7487  
© The author(s), 2010 | Licensed to the Surveillance Studies Network under a Creative Commons 
Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives license. 
 
 
Massimo Ragnedda 
Dipartimento Economia Istituzione e Società, University of Sassari, Italy. ragnedda@uniss.it  
 
 
School safety is of concern to the American public in general. Parents, students, teachers and staff want 
safe places where they and their children can study and work. Schools under Surveillance sheds light on 
the complexities of the culture of control in the public education system. Editors Monahan and Torres 
have collected thirteen essays from researchers studying surveillance and discipline in contemporary 
public schools in North America, mostly in the US, offering a brilliant guide to this topic. The contributors 
are American academics with different disciplinary backgrounds. The topics they address are wide-
ranging, and include privacy and human rights issues, the cultural politics of race in urban education, new 
disciplinary orders in the carceral school and the security cultures and everyday resistance to school 
surveillance.  
 
Overall, the book presents a pragmatic and multi-disciplinary approach to the issue of surveillance and 
discipline in contemporary public schools. This volume’s interdisciplinarity makes the collection a 
provocative and stimulating reflection on cultures of control but also provides a brilliant overview of 
creative forms of resistance. Public schools, in particular in the US, are now among the most surveilled 
spaces, but perhaps because of this, are also creative spaces for resisting surveillance mechanisms. 
Teachers and students resist in different ways and not just through acts of sabotage but also through forms 
of artistic performance.  
 
This volume is important for several reasons. It collects fruitful essays theorizing the implications of 
contemporary arrangements in school surveillance and discipline. It demonstrates the dangerous linkages 
between faith in markets, public fear and the rise of cultures of control. Indeed it is in this fertile neoliberal 
domain that omnipresent surveillance has developed. The essays in the book also offer powerful 
explanations of the various meanings of contemporary mechanisms of control, including their effects on 
public education.  
 
The book is divided into five parts. Part one reflects on the new disciplinary orders that have developed in 
American public schools. Part two focuses on two aspects of the business orientation of neoliberal 
schools: on the one hand, how the public school is a business which produces security tools; and on the 
other hand, and more disconcertingly, how schools are becoming a market for purchasing student data. 
Part three, “Security Cultures,” charts the motivations behind school shootings and the national security 
priorities that have followed in their aftermath. In part four, the authors analyze educational accountability 
in a neoliberal surveillance state, exploring the dangerous combination of privatization and centralization 
of control occurring in the field of education. Finally, in part five the authors explore how students and 
teachers try to resist school surveillance.  
 
Book 
Review 
Monahan, Torin and Rodolfo D. Torres (eds.) Schools Under Surveillance: 
Cultures of Control in Public Education. New Brunswick, New Jersey, 
London: Rutgers University Press. 
264 pp. $24.95 (US), Paperback. ISBN: 978-0-8135-4680-3.  
Ragnedda: Monahan and Torres’ (eds.) Schools Under Surveillance 
Surveillance & Society 7(3/4) 357 
Many of the chapters raise the issue of how school security policies have consequences and effects for 
everyday life, including how various mechanisms contribute to a culture of control. The authors point out 
in varying ways the contrast between the perception that school security needs are quite grave while the 
statistics suggest that school violence may not be such a pressing problem. Despite this, the culture of 
control continues to expand, transforming the school into a hyper-surveilled space. This is particularly true 
in America. From a European perspective, particularly from an Italian perspective, this sense of fear, and 
the needs for security seems less pressing. The Italian public school (more than 90% of the schools in the 
country) are not at all “the most surveilled space” and the fear of school shooting is almost non-existent. 
For this reason, this book is doubly important for non-US readers who are apt to be unfamiliar with such 
developments. The essays paint cruel but brilliant pictures of the US public school and its culture of 
security, making the US context accessible to those in other nations. Those outside North America will be 
surprised to encounter US public schools where metal detectors, standard tests and digital checkpoints are 
ordinary parts of school administration. As such, the book reveals the dangerous direction in which the 
rest of the world may be headed.  
 
Several themes recur throughout of the book. One is that surveillance is much more than simply 
monitoring, watching and recording individuals and their data. “Surveillance is a privileged form of 
modern knowledge production, organizational management, and social control” (p. 13). Surveillance is an 
interaction of power that creates and advances relations of domination. In practice, surveillance is a mode 
of governance, one that controls access and opportunities. Another recurring theme is the critique of using 
surveillance as a means of “social sorting,” as to discriminate between groups who are classified 
differently. This is a particularly acute issue for racial minorities who are disproportionately subjected to 
contemporary school-based surveillance. This example demonstrates how control mechanism can be 
applied differently and with different effects. A final theme worth noting that lurks below the surface of 
the book is the influence of neoliberal values and neoliberal dispositifs on the growth of the cultures of 
control.  
 
Schools under Surveillance powerfully describes the accountability regime in American schools and the 
play of surveillance in this regime. The book should be central reading for those engaging in empirical and 
theoretical work in surveillance studies and should be of particular interest to those studying public 
institutions.  
 
 


Book review: <i>Schools under surveillance: cultures of control in public education</i> by Monahan Torin and Rodolfo D. Torres

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