Supervision: On Motherhood and Surveillance

A wide-ranging, first-of-its-kind anthology of art and writing exploring how surveillance impacts contemporary motherhood.

The tracking of our personal information, activities, and medical data through our phones and smartwatches is an increasingly recognizable field in which the lines between caretaking and control are blurring. In our social media and digital surveillance age, mothers’ behaviors and bodies are observed, made public, exposed, scrutinized, and policed like never before. Supervision: On Motherhood and Surveillance, an interdisciplinary anthology edited by Sophie Hamacher with Jessica Hankey, gathers together the work of forty contributors, both established and emerging figures in their respective fields, to ask what the relationship is between how we watch and how we are watched, and how the attention that mothers pay to their children might foster a kind of counterattention to the many ways in which mothers are scrutinized.

Just as motherhood intersects with multiple aspects of daily life, so does Supervision touch on mass incarceration, medicine, psychology, sociology, environmental studies and ecology, politics, and art. A groundbreaking collection, Supervision is a project about vision (and supervision), and all the ways in which vision intersects with surveillance and politics, through motherhood and personal history as well as through the histories and relations of the societies in which we live.