Counter-Visual Artifacts: Negotiating Surveillance and Carceral Visuality in Public Housing through Videovoice

Key findings from this study

This research indicates that:

• Counter-visual artifacts created by surveilled residents challenge dominant visual regimes that shape institutional governance and perception of public housing communities.
• Resident-generated video documentation surfaces lived consequences of carceral visuality and situated knowledge typically absent from surveillance analytics.
• Alternative ways of seeing public housing space emerge when residents exercise agency over visual representation of their routines, spatial practices, and imaginaries.

Overview

This research examines how residents of U.S. public housing communities used smartphones to create video documentation of their daily routines, spatial practices, and experiences with surveillance. Public housing has historically functioned as a site of racialized and carceral surveillance. Digital surveillance technologies amplify this containment by reinforcing carceral visuality—the institutionalized visual frameworks that shape governance and perception of public housing spaces and residents. The videovoice project enabled residents to capture their own perspectives and situate their lived knowledge against dominant surveillance regimes.

Methods and approach

Residents used smartphones to document their routines, spatial practices, and imaginaries in relation to surveillance. The resulting video artifacts were analyzed for their capacity to enact alternative ways of seeing and knowing public housing communities. The analysis surfaced overlooked routines, social relations, and resident critiques of surveillance practices.

Results

The video artifacts functioned as counter-visual materials that challenged dominant visual regimes governing public housing perception. These videos documented previously invisibilized phenomena: the lived consequences of carceral visuality and the situated knowledge of surveilled residents. The counter-visual artifacts demonstrated how residents can reclaim agency in how they are seen and how they see their own communities.

The videos revealed routine activities and social relations typically absent from surveillance analytics and institutional records. Resident-generated visual documentation produced alternative interpretations of public housing space, distinct from carceral visual frameworks. These artifacts surfaced critiques of surveillance that emerge from embodied experience within surveilled environments.

Implications

The research indicates that counter-visual sensibilities offer a reorientation for human-computer interaction scholarship. HCI researchers can leverage artifacts and technologies that create space for alternative ways of seeing, knowing, and representing communities subject to institutional surveillance. This approach acknowledges that those subject to surveillance possess situated knowledge and interpretive authority over their own spatial practices and experiences.

The work challenges surveillance systems that rely on dominant visual regimes to mediate perception and governance of public housing residents. Foregrounding counter-visual artifacts creates opportunities to contest the visual apparatus of carceral systems. By centering resident perspectives and agency, this framework reframes surveillance not as inevitable but as contestable through alternative visual practices and knowledge production.

Scope and limitations

This summary is based on the study abstract and available metadata. It does not include a full analysis of the complete paper, supplementary materials, or underlying datasets unless explicitly stated. Findings should be interpreted in the context of the original publication.