Doctor of Philosophy in Sociology - Media, Information and Surveillance

Queen's University

The Department of Sociology at Queen’s University focuses on critical social inquiry and in-depth research, offering students challenging projects and world-class resources to complete them. Our faculty members are all well-published scholars with national or international reputations, yet they still manage to maintain an open-door policy and establish supportive, mentoring relationships with students. We are part of The Surveillance Studies Centre, a multi-disciplinary international research initiative which studies issues ranging from supermarket loyalty cards to police networks searching for suspects. We also collaborate with other departments in the university including – Development Studies, Gender Studies, Cultural Studies and Kinesiology and Health Studies.This cluster develops sociologies of the digital including critical studies of the latest media, data, information technologies, and networks. Social media, visual media, ‘smart’ technologies and digital data traces are all research topics in this group. The area draws on and develops related research in feminist, science-and-technology studies and cultural studies. In the past three decades, participants have achieved prominence for their pioneering and award winning work on the historical sociology of communications in Canada, the critique of the "information society," investigating "digital divides" in Canada and abroad, and the rapid rise of digital surveillance. Insights from disciplinary areas such as cultural geography, philosophy and history are vital to the cluster, which also has a close working relationship with the Surveillance Studies Centre.