The Dossierveillance Project
The Dossierveillance Project
The Dossierveillance Project was started in 2019, at the beginning of the Covid 19 pandemic by Cristina Plamadeala, PhD. The aim of this project is increase awareness of this phenomenon and foster research on this subject with public policy implications. ​The mission of this initiative is to create a world where the implications of dossierveillance are understood and tackled through improving awareness of this phenomenon and developing policies at the national level aiming to protect people of its repercussions.​ Dossierveillance is a type of surveillance wherein the file (or a series of files), paper-based or virtual, lies at the center of what makes a person afraid or reluctant to act in a particular manner or to disclose information that, once placed in the file, has the potentiality to be interpreted in a way deemed or perceived as harmful for the respective person (Plamadeala 2019a, 2019b).
About
The dossier in dossierveillance holds power on a person either through its existence or the possibility of its existence and thus being potentially employed in the future in a way that would harm the respective person.
The dossier is, therefore, the cause of one’s self-surveillance or self-censorship. The person subjected to dossierveillance learns, as a result, to be careful, secretive or reluctant to offer details concerning the information divulged to a specific authority compiling the dossier or to act in ways that, if taken note of, may not harm the respective person in the future (Plamadeala 2019a, 2019b).
The peril of dossierveillance comes neither from the dossier nor the writer’s dossier, on their own, but from the possibility of its falling into the hands of those who may treat the information in the dossier in a way that may or will hurt the respective person.
Dossierveillance is thus often but not always an imaginary affair, based on the possibility rather than the actual harm the dossier in dossierveillance can cause.
And yet, this possibility, projected into the future, can instigate great fear and anxiety into the one about whom the dossier is about (Plamadeala 2019a, 2019b).
