CDH-cookbook

Protecting our movements: research methods against surveillance

^ Methods Fellows 2025

The Protecting our movements: research methods against surveillance workshop brought together researchers, librarians, arts practitioners, radical publishers and organisers to explore research practices that can be carried out in solidarity with social movements facing digital surveillance and other forms of repression. The workshop’s central aim was to examine practical ways to leverage the university’s institutional location to support movements, particularly in the context of growing criminalisation of dissent and digital repression globally and locally. The design of the workshop reflected the understanding of fear as an embodied experience, and integrated practices to guide participants through fear-inducing contexts towards creative, resourceful and bolder collective actions.

The session opened with a collective grounding exercise, inviting participants to arrive in their bodies and to name the commitments and relationships they were bringing into the space. This practice set the tone for an ethics of presence: participants reflected on how they already show up across different contexts, and how these commitments might guide their research practices. A brief agreement on holding a “safe enough” space, including a reminder about confidentiality, underlined that building trust is an ongoing process rather than something that can be assumed.

A substantial portion of the workshop focused on the current landscape of surveillance and repression of social movements, with particular attention to Palestine-solidarity organising and actions against state and corporate complicity in genocide. Participants connected their own research and organising experiences to wider infrastructures of digital policing, surveillance technologies and the military and arms industries, drawing on resources such as the Security Abolition Manifesto and recent analyses of legislative changes in the US and their global implications for Big Tech dominance. Discussion highlighted how disability and criminalisation are co-constructed, and how governments readily integrate US-based technologies into domestic policing and control.

The workshop then turned to “infrastructures of care” as a counter to what participants described as paralysis under pervasive surveillance, and what Palestinian linguist Dr Khawla Badwan names as as a “production of civic cowardice”. Pod mapping was introduced as a transformative justice tool for making visible and strengthening networks of care and accountability beyond carceral institutions, supported by worksheets and guides developed by transformative justice practitioners. In pairs and small groups, participants experimented with pod mapping to identify existing support structures and gaps, and to imagine how such infrastructures could sustain both organising and research work in hostile environments.

In the final segment, participants reflected on the specific role of universities in this ecosystem. While some framed universities as comparatively lower-risk spaces in which to experiment with practices before broader application, others emphasised the limits of existing institutional support and the need for material redistribution and careful discernment about publishing. Topics included sharing institutional resources (time, rooms, printing, access to paywalled materials), conducting risk assessments as practical research tools, and maintaining confidentiality by not publishing internal safety protocols. Across these discussions, there was a shared sense that scholarly work must be resourced and supported especially when working from within movements and communities under surveillance, and that universities more often than not tended to be another source of surveillance instead of sources of supportive infrastructure.

Many commented that the opportunity to slow down, incorporate embodied centring practices and connect around commitments felt unusual within the university context, yet crucial for cultivating the trust, creativity and courage needed for bolder collective action.

https://truthout.org/audio/we-live-in-fearful-times-our-safety-comes-through-preparing-together/

Digital first aid kit https://digitalfirstaid.org/

v helpful list of organisations that could support protective efforts of different kinds (across different regions) https://digitalfirstaid.org/support/

Quick links to some reliable helplines

Security helplines https://www.accessnow.org/help/

Incident response fund https://www.digitaldefenders.org/incident-response-fund/

Digital protection accompaniment: If you are thinking about your role as a researcher who accompanies a group (but is not a core part of it), then some of the suggestions in this manual on accompanying groups as they develop safer digital practices might be relevant to you: https://manual.digitaldefenders.org/

Overview of digital policing harms:

https://weavingliberation.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/Digital-policing-harms.pdf

https://weavingliberation.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/Tools-of-resistance.pdf