Chris Gilliard

Chris Gilliard, PhD, is a writer, professor, and speaker whose scholarship examines digital privacy, surveillance, and the intersections of race, class, and technology. He was recently a JustTech Fellow of the Social Science Research Council, and Visiting Research Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School Shorenstein Center. Dr. Gilliard is a member of the UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry Scholars Council and Surveillance Technology Oversight Project community advisory board. He is currently the Co-director of the Critical Internet Studies Institute. His book Luxury Surveillance is forthcoming from MIT Press in 2025.  

Dr. Gillard’s recent work posits that while minoritized and poor people have the greatest vulnerability to intrusive and experimental forms of surveillance, privileged people are not as exempt from probing sensors as they imagine themselves to be. In fact, their embrace of luxury surveillance technologies expands the surveillant gaze far beyond the eyes of the state. His writing traverses the involuntary imposition of carceral technologies on Black Detroit and public school classrooms, to the willing middle class embrace of high status gadgets that encourages a surveillant gaze far beyond the eyes of the state.