About

Professor Kelly Gates is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication and Science Studies at UC San Diego. Her research focuses on the critical analysis of digital media technologies, with particular emphasis on the politics and social implications of computerization and surveillance in the United States from the mid-twentieth century to the present. She has authored the book 'Our Biometric Future: Facial Recognition Technology and the Culture of Surveillance,' which explores the social construction of automated facial recognition and facial expression analysis, emphasizing that no computer vision program can be culturally neutral. Her work examines how these technologies shape and redefine notions of humanity and social practices. Her 2025 book, 'Targeted: Corporations and the Police Surveillance Economy,' investigates the role of video content and infrastructure in modern policing and security, highlighting the entanglement of police and corporate interests through video forensics, private surveillance, body-worn cameras, and video analytics. At UCSD, she teaches courses on the history of communication research, the Internet and society, visual culture, and surveillance. She holds a PhD in Communications Research from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, earned in 2004.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Sociology
• Political Science
• Business
• Literature
• Law
• Aesthetics
• Art
• History
• Economics
• Criminology
• Political economy
• Media studies
• Finance
• Public relations

Selected publications

• Infrastructure Photography and the AI Data Center Building Boom

  Photography and Culture · 2025-03-27 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Acknowledgments

  University of California Press eBooks · 2024

  • Computer Science
  • Computer Science

  Acknowled gmentsMuddy Thinking has been the culmination of many years of graduate and postgraduate work that started in San Diego and ended in New Orleans-two very different kinds of places.Throughout, I have carried the steadfast support of my graduate adviser and mentor, Patrick Anderson, who embraced the potential for mud from the outset and simply refused to allow me to stray off into more conventional paths.His introduction to the editors at University of California Press, I believe, was critical for keeping the idea alive and real for me-which it remained through the stewardship of three project editors, who passed the baton flawlessly.My wife, Jessica Shank, has been steadfast in her unerring belief in my ability to complete a dissertation, and now a book.Her support has been crucial, even if at times a little baffling to me.But I accept it as one excepts a very generous giftwith humility.My mother, Sanna Thomas, and stepfather, John Thomas, have been dogged copy editors with precision I have appreciated throughout.They proofread more than their share of work, which, I'm sure,

  DOI

• <i>Day of Rage</i> : Forensic journalism and the US Capitol riot

  Media Culture & Society · 2023-07-24 · 3 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This article examines how video journalism produced by the elite press is using forensic techniques and aesthetics as part of the effort to reinvent journalistic authority in a fragmented media and political sphere. I first discuss some earlier moments in which news coverage of events adopted a media-forensic epistemology and style, and then turn to the formation of the New York Times Visual Investigations team, a group at the leading-edge of this type of journalism today. I provide an analysis of one of the team’s investigative reports, a 40-minute account of the January 6 Capitol riot assembled from vernacular video, surveillance footage, police bodycam video, and other non-news source materials. In both its formal aspects and its subject matter, the piece represents an important example for understanding an emerging form of forensic journalism. While the January 6 Capitol riot was not the first time news coverage of a violent event adopted a forensic style and epistemology, the forensic-media coverage of the riot represents a unique conjuncture. A new convergence of media-technological developments and journalist practices shaped how the storming of the Capitol was experienced, investigated, and covered as a media event.

  PublisherDOI

• The Cultural Labor of Surveillance:

  2022-01-01

  other1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• COVID-19 and the Care of the Financialized Self

  TOPIA Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies · 2022 · 2 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Business
  • Economics

  In the United States, the threat of COVID-19 as a public health problem was impossible to separate from the financial threat. From the start, the virus’s circulation through human bodies intermingled with all the ways human lives had been defined by neoliberalism’s economizing rationality. To unpack the convergence of the pandemic with neoliberal rationality, this article examines the financial advisory discourse produced by credit and fintech companies at the start of the pandemic, focusing on Equifax, Experian, and Mint. This messaging was replete with expressions of care, along with promises of institutional assistance. However, reading further it became clear the companies offered mostly financial self-help advice. The immediate turn to this type of messaging suggested how much the financial system depended on a collective continuation of the individual’s sense of moral responsibility for financial self-management and creditworthiness, and especially diligent debt-payment.

  PublisherDOI

• Media Evidence and Forensic Journalism

  Surveillance & Society · 2020 · 19 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Media studies
  • Sociology

  This essay engages with the question of surveillance and evidence by considering the use of media forensics in journalistic storytelling. The use of video evidence and other data derived from surveillance systems to assemble investigative news results in a documentary form of what Thomas Levin (2002) calls surveillant narration—a tendency in cinema to treat surveillance thematically while at the same time incorporating it into the structure of the narration itself. If using surveillance as the structure of journalistic narration seems like a natural fit, it is for its aesthetic effect as much as its evidentiary value. Forensic journalism is emerging as one site where media forensics becomes formalized as a product of popular consumption and sense-making, taking its place alongside forensic-themed reality television and fictional crime dramas like CSI, as much as real forensic investigations and legal proceedings.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• 61. Surveillance

  New York University Press eBooks · 2020-12-31

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Policing as Digital Platform

  Surveillance & Society · 2019-03-31 · 26 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Much of the discussion about platforms and “platform capitalism” centers on commercial platform companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple. Shoshana Zuboff’s (2015) analysis of “surveillance capitalism” similarly focuses on Google as the trailblazer pushing the new logic of accumulation that is focused on data extraction and analysis of human activities. In his typology of platform companies, Nick Srnicek (2017) includes less visible industrial platforms that situate themselves as intermediaries between companies rather than between companies and consumer-users. In this article, the focus is a platform-building effort that looks something like an industrial platform but differs in the sense that the company in question, Axon Enterprise, aims to situate itself as an intermediary within and among law enforcement agencies (non-market entities) as a means of building a large-scale data-extractive system of monetization. Axon’s business strategy is emblematic of the ways that police evidence and record-keeping systems are being reimagined, and to some extent reconfigured, as sources of data extraction and analytics on the model of the platform. Whether Axon succeeds or is eclipsed by a competitor like Palantir or even Amazon or Microsoft, the process of reimagining and reorganizing policing as a platform is underway—a process that, to paraphrase Zuboff, deeply imbricates public and private surveillance activities, dissolving the boundary between public and private authority in the surveillance project.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Surveillance

  NYU Press eBooks · 2018-05-11

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• 1. Facial Recognition Technology from the Lab to the Marketplace

  New York University Press eBooks · 2016-04-19

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter examines how automated facial recognition and related technologies were envisioned and designed to serve a set of institutional priorities during the period of political-economic neoliberalization in the United States. In the United States the effort to program computers to identify human faces began in the 1960s in research labs funded by the Department of Defense and intelligence agencies. By the 1990s new companies were formed to commercialize the technology, searching for market especially among institutions operating proprietary computer networks and large-scale identification systems. Across these sectors, biometric identification promised to enable the “securitization of identity,” the intensification of identification practices at a proliferation of sites—a priority that has gone hand in hand with political-economic and governmental neoliberalization.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Dawn Muir

  University of Northern Colorado

  4 shared

• A‐K. Eckermann

  4 shared

• Mary Hammill

  Fisheries and Oceans Canada

  4 shared

• Noel Morich

  Universities UK

  4 shared

• Raeme Goves-Jacka

  4 shared

• Christopher Kenworthy

  4 shared

• R. B. Forrest

  Universities UK

  4 shared

• Michael Christie

  Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology

  4 shared

Education

• PhD, Institute of Communications Research

  University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

  2004

• Mass Communication, Mass Communication

  Miami University

  1993

• Advertising, Communication

  Pennsylvania State University

  1991