Urban laboratories of biometric security: the technopolitics of facial recognition systems in Brazil

• Grant number: 20/05628-1
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Post-Doctoral
• Start date: December 01, 2020
• End date: January 31, 2024
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Sociology - Other specific Sociologies
• Principal Investigator: Marcos César Alvarez
• Grantee: Daniel Edler Duarte
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil

Abstract

The production of order in Brazilian metropolises relies upon a number of scanning tools that extract real-time data on urban flows, communications and individual behaviors. While observing surveillance systems as sociotechnical assemblages - composed by institutional controversies, political calculations and material constraints that rearticulate elements in time and space -, this research aims at understanding how facial recognition apparatuses rearrange technologies of government and security practices in Brazil. Specifically, the point is to investigate the making and automation of categories of suspicion and deviance, questioning how these processes impact social control techniques. Therefore, the research encompasses an analysis of police routines, but it also maps public/private relations in the security sector, and examines everyday practices of data mining, algorithmic engineering, and the many uses of facial recognition platforms. In this process, I argue that programmers, data scientists, statisticians and designers become stakeholders in criminal justice systems and coauthors of punitive apparatuses. Engaging both surveillance studies and sociology of punishment literatures, the research seeks to answers a few questions: how are facial recognition devices composed? What are the political choices and material constraints involved in the translation of bodies into algorithmic representations? In short, how these biometric systems produce new ontologies of deviant bodies and what technologies of power they entice? (AU)

Scientific publications

(References retrieved automatically from Web of Science and SciELO through information on FAPESP grants and their corresponding numbers as mentioned in the publications by the authors)

DANIEL EDLER DUARTE; MARCELO M. VALENÇA. Securitizando a COVID- 19? A política de saúde global e os limites da Escola de Copenhagen. Contexto int., v. 43, n. 2, p. 235-257, 2021-08-16. (20/05628-1)

DUARTE, DANIEL EDLER. The Making of Crime Predictions: Sociotechnical Assemblages and the Controversies of Governing Future Crime. SURVEILLANCE & SOCIETY, v. 19, n. 2, p. 199-215, 2021. (20/05628-1)

DANIEL EDLER DUARTE; PEDRO ROLO BENETTI. Pela Ciência, contra os cientistas? Negacionismo e as disputas em torno das políticas de saúde durante a pandemia. Sociologias, v. 24, n. 60, p. 98-138, 2022-09-26. (20/05628-1)