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Why are so many social media apps free? How did surveillance take place before the internet? What does the TSA see when you go through a body scanner at the airport? This seminar will help students answer these questions by introducing them to the historical development of surveillance cultures as well as their contemporary iterations. We will explore how surveillance shapes communities, politics, subjectivities, and more broadly, our everyday lives. Through readings of key academic texts, documentaries, literary texts, ethnographies, and current events, we will try to gain a full picture, through discussion, of how surveillance has evolved and come to permeate society. By understanding surveillance as a technology of power, we will analyze how this power is applied differentially across different marginalized groups and in different regional contexts. In addition, we will examine the political possibilities that emerge from activist and otherwise everyday tactics to counteract surveillance.