This dissertation chronicles the rise of school safety and surveillance policy in New York City and gives an overview of the wider, neoliberal policy context out of which contemporary school surveillance policy has emerged. More and more, public schools are becoming part of the network of post-9/11, state-sponsored surveillance—spaces in which students experience firsthand what it is to be monitored, feared, contained, and harassed and in the name of safety and protection. Across the country, urban and suburban public schools are choosing to respond to issues related to violence and school safety by deploying an array of surveilling techniques and technologies. These include: cameras, metal detectors, scanning wands, security and police personnel, and ID tracking systems. As has been widely documented in a series of reports, however, these measures do not necessarily produce safer school environments. Students refer to an increase in the number of violent incidences, attest to harassment they experience at the hands of police and school safety agents (SSA), and describe a feeling of danger and disillusion.

This dissertation draws upon several theoretical frameworks to analyze surveillance practices and policies in an urban school, and provides an analysis of these practices and policies across a sociopolitical landscape. In this context, this study analyzes the concept of resistance by examining three forms that emerged during my research including protest, tactical avoidance, and appropriation. The most surprising and important form of resistance was that of an after school poetry club and its use of writing as a form of 'sousveillance' which means to 'survey from below'.

Over the course of eight months, I conducted ongoing theoretical research and participatory observation focused on how urban students in public schools across New York City, particularly those in high-need schools, were confronting and contending with the daily injustices of school-based surveillance. The study reveals how urban teenagers perceive being watched and monitored so pervasively—often through a lens of suspicion. Further, it explores how they negotiate, play with, or manipulate the gaze of surveillance all around them.