Shifting from Surveillance-as-Safety to Safety-through-Noticing: A Photovoice Study with Eastside Detroit Residents

Safety has been used to justify the expansion of today’s large-scale surveillance infrastructures in American cities. Our work offers empirical and theoretical groundings on why and how the safety-surveillance conflation that reproduces harm toward communities of color must be denaturalized. In a photovoice study conducted in collaboration with a Detroit community organization and a university team, we invited 11 Black mid-aged and senior Detroiters to use photography to capture their lived experiences of navigating personal and community safety. Their photographic narratives unveil acts of “everyday noticing” in negotiating and maintaining their intricate and interdependent relations with human, non-human animals, plants, spaces, and material things, through which a multiplicity of meaning and senses of safety are produced and achieved. Everyday noticing, as simultaneously a survival skill and a more-than-human care act, is situated in residents’ lived materialities, while also serving as a site for critiquing the reductive and exclusionary vision embedded in large-scale surveillance infrastructures. By proposing an epistemological shift from surveillance-as-safety to safety-through-noticing, we invite future HCI work to attend to the fluid and relational forms of safety that emerge from local entanglement and sensibilities.