prof.dr.mr. (Marc) MB Schuilenburg

Biography

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

Marc Schuilenburg was appointed in 2021 as Professor of Digital Surveillance at Erasmus School of Law. Schuilenburg studied at the School of Law and the Faculty of Philosophy of the Erasmus University Rotterdam. He obtained his PhD in social sciences at the VU University Amsterdam.

In his appointment, Schuilenburg studies with his PhD's, colleagues and students, among other themes, the social and ethical aspects of digital surveillance, AI and policing. The main focus of his research is on the increase in size and complexity of AI-tools, which increasingly rely on algorithms and big data to support decision-making and to predict ‘risky’ patterns and ‘suspicious’ persons. Schuilenburg is interested how surveillance technologies can be designed with ‘care’ and sensibly to democratic values such as fairness, accountability and transparency. Special attention is given how AI-tools are understood, articulated, experienced or even resisted by various actors, and how these experiences can have real consequences in daily practice.

Schuilenburg is the author of Making Surveillance Public (Eleven, 2024). In this book, je explores 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, he makes a case for a digital criminology centred on sociological questions of power, knowledge and AI-experiences. Gary Marx called 'Making Surveilance Public' a 'cogent, crisp, and convincing book on the challenges brought by AI and big data applications with respect to crime control and security'.

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

Schuilenburg has 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.