Camille was awarded the Mary Le Messurier Award for the Study of History 2024-2025.
Camille Crichlow is a third-year doctoral student at University College London where her research is based in the Sarah Parker Remond Centre for the Study of Racism and Racialisation (SPRC). Camille’s research aligns with SPRC’s commitment to the production of new, historically informed investigations into the continuing impacts of racial inequality in the 21st century.
Against largely taken-for-granted assumptions by technology developers and their investors that biometric identification technologies guarantee a ‘neutral’ and ‘post-racial approach to security and identity management, Camille’s research investigates how historical
assumptions of racial difference are codified, however imperceptibly, in 21st century biometric identification infrastructures and wider surveillance mechanisms. Extending recent scholarship on biometric surveillance technology and its links to the historical archive of transatlantic slavery, race science and early statistics, her project builds a critical genealogy of racialising surveillance practices from the 19th Century to the present. Given the multitude of biometric identification technologies now ubiquitous in everyday life, Camille’s research has a specific focus on the workings of facial recognition technologies (FRT), whose origins she ties to the historical roots of colonial control and racial domination. Camille employs a genealogical and intermedial approach, mining historical archives and theoretical discourses across techno-science, philosophy, ethnography, museology, and visual culture. By adopting this versatile methodology, her project aims to contribute a nuanced understanding of the historical roots and contemporary implications of biometric surveillance technologies, fostering a critical dialogue that is crucial for addressing the ethical and social challenges posed by widespread adoption.
Exponential expansion of AI-driven surveillance technologies in everyday life spawned an insurgence of techno-deterministic doctrines and data-positivist discourses requiring rigorous scholarly response. Camille’s research aims to provide valuable insights for policymakers tasked with ensuring accountability of data-driven technologies and their creators. She hopes to ensure that Canada’s strategies and systems stay abreast of an ever-evolving landscape of technological change, while remaining deeply attentive to broader aims of democratic life in a complexly diverse society.
Born and raised in Toronto, Camille completed an honours degree in Cultural Studies and Political Theory at McGill University, then moving to London to pursue her MA and PhD studies. Outside her research, Camille has served as an editorial assistant at Afterall, a contemporary art-focused research centre and publication house at the University of the Arts, London, and has given guest lectures in the UK and abroad. In Slovenia she gave a paper at the Surveillance and Society conference. She is published widely and has a chapter in the Handbook on Data and Society (Sage forthcoming). In her spare time, Camille loves the outdoors and is training to run a marathon in the Peak District National Park of England.
