Harmoniously Denied: COVID-19 and the Latent Effects of Censorship
Journal: Surveillance & Society
Year: 2021

While few would doubt that censorship is a form of surveillance, the practice and theory of censorship does not hold as prominent a place within surveillance studies as one might think. In this paper, we demonstrate the constitutive effects of censorship that seep into the collective mentality and, in Foucauldian terms, “conducts the conduct.” We examine the wider socio-political impact of China’s censorship of COVID-19. We argue that censorship is a force “at large.” By this we refer to the per