prof.dr.mr. (Marc) MB Schuilenburg

Biography

Marc Schuilenburg is Professor of Digital Surveillance at Erasmus School of Law.

Marc Schuilenburg studied at the School of Law and the Faculty of Philosophy of the Erasmus University Rotterdam. Before his university teaching, Marc worked for six years for the Dutch Public Prosecution Service. He was appointed in 2021 as Professor of Digital Surveillance at Erasmus School of Law (and works one day a week at TNO).

The focus of my research is on the increase in size and complexity of surveillance technologies, which increasingly rely on AI and algorithms to support decision-making and to predict ‘risky’ patterns and persons. I am interested how AI-technologies can be designed with ‘care’ and sensibly to democratic values such as fairness, accountability and transparency. Special attention is given how AI applications are understood, articulated, experienced or even resisted by various actors, and how these AI experiences can have real consequences for the results of a security program.

I'm the author of Making Surveillance Public: Why You Should Be More Woke About AI and Algorithms (Eleven, 2024). In this book, I explore the deployment of AI applications, asking who is using them, what their aims are, what outcomes and societal impacts they lead to, and against whom they are used. To this end, I make a case for a digital criminology centred on sociological questions of power, knowledge and AI-experiences.

I also published the critically and highly acclaimed books Hysteria (Routledge, 2021), The Securitization of Society (NYU-Press, 2015) and Mediapolis (010-Publishers, 2006). I edited eight books, including The Algorithmic Society (Routledge, 2021) and Positive Criminology (Eleven, 2014). My PhD on security assemblages in urban environments was awarded the triennial Willem Nagel Prize by the Dutch Society of Criminology. I have been a visiting professor in New York (John Jay College, 2013) and Ipswich (University Campus Suffolk, 2014-2020).

I have been featured in (inter)national newspaper, radio and television media outlets, including VICE, Open Democracy, NPO Radio, Nieuwsuur, NRC Handelsblad, de Volkskrant, Trouw, de Groene Amsterdammer, Euronews, Follow the Money, the Correspondent, NOS, and Arte.