LSA panel accepted

The papers that comprise this panel map legal and cultural terrains of regulatory practices that broadly fall under the umbrellas of ‘policing’ and ‘surveillance’. Ranging in scope, scale, and place, each paper focuses on distinctly different cultural contours, regulatory aims, and conceptual frameworks. In doing so, the topics of this panel showcase a host of socio-legal concerns that traverse international, transnational, and domestic geographies as well as translocal, biopolitical, and technocratic fields. Despite being uniquely situated, the papers collectively take aim at two interrelated concerns: First, they trace the discernible and liminal elements of surveillant activities, and second, by doing so, they query the relationships between ‘jurisdiction’ and the subjects within its boundaries. This preliminary excavation thus reconsiders how authoritarian claims—irrespective of state or nonstate sanctioning—can posit alternative cartographies of jurisdiction.