Seminar in Media Studies: Surveillance and Society.  This course considers the significance of surveillance in its broadest sense -- as a form of social control. New communication technologies have facilitated the expansion and intensification of surveillance in contemporary life, particularly in the spheres of government, commerce, online interaction, and security. This course tracks the historical development of surveillance, from its origins in embodied social experience and recordkeeping through the rise of the modern database, biometrics, and social media. This history provides a backdrop against which major theoretical perspectives on surveillance are introduced, drawing special attention to the impact of surveillance on the social construction of identity, the classification of populations, and the naturalization of social categories.