This roundtable situates the contemporary moment of heightened state surveillance in the much longer history and evolution of government tracking. It explores how shifting police capacities and reconnaissance techniques have impacted laws, policies, and state power, as well as Americans’ potential for personal freedom, activism, and mobility.

Rather than giving formal papers, the panelists will engage in wide-ranging talk show style discussion, drawing from their own diverse research agendas and spurred on by questions posed by the chair and the audience.

Brooke Blower’s comments will center on the long history of US border crossing and jurisdiction jumping by those seeking bodily autonomy and family choice: enslaved people claiming freedom for newborns in regions with free womb laws; spouses in search of laxer divorce laws; interracial couples eloping out of the reach of anti-miscegenation statutes; and women seeking birth control, abortions, or other reproductive care. She will reflect on how changing tracking technologies—from slave runaway ads to genetic genealogy— circumscribed these movements in particular ways.

Charisse Burden-Stelly’s comments will draw on the experience of the Black revolutionary W. Alphaeus Hunton to analyze and theorize how radical Black organizing was subjected to state repression from the 1930s to the 1950s. State actors used the law, congressional committees, and the courtroom to surveil, harass, and incarcerate Hunton as he organized on behalf of economic freedom and racial equality.

Dr. Farmer's comments will include insights from her book project, Watched: The Black Women Tracked by the FBI, a history of the rise and fall of COINTELPRO through the eyes of the Black women Hoover hunted. The Bureau’s founding and the targeting of Black women go hand-in-hand. Drawing on her research of the bureau’s first twenty years, Farmer will discuss some of the earliest cases of the Bureau’s tracking of Black women and how this shapes our understanding of state surveillance today.

Seema Sohi's comments will draw from her research on the anticolonial politics of South Asian intellectuals and migrant workers based in North America during the early twentieth century as well as the inter-imperial efforts of the U.S. and British states to repress them through surveillance, immigration exclusion, deportation and incarceration. She will show how race and surveillance were deeply intertwined in discourses and practices of national and imperial security and how immigration exclusion functioned as a tool of political repression.