
Noah McClainSanta Clara University | SCU · Department of Sociology
Noah McClain
Ph.D.
About
37
Publications
18,506
Reads
How we measure 'reads'
A 'read' is counted each time someone views a publication summary (such as the title, abstract, and list of authors), clicks on a figure, or views or downloads the full-text. Learn more
265
Citations
Introduction
Skills and Expertise
Publications
Publications (37)
Zero-priced goods (which we call ‘free stuff’) are an overlooked foundation of privilege. From corporate perks to meal accoutrements and easy access to bathrooms, free stuff does work of a number of important types, from easing everyday personal routine to solidifying economic ties. We trace the flow of free stuff using an ‘affordance’ perspective...
Surveillance technologies may be capable of monitoring a domain, but they need a sufficiently orderly domain to monitor. This article examines the secretive effort to institute artificial-intelligence-based ‘smart surveillance’ in the New York subway, using object- and pattern-recognition algorithms to identify dangerous activities in video feeds,...
This article investigates how an account of hidden, internal properties of an everyday technology became a framework to interpret human action as a serious crime. Using a case study situated in the New York subway system, I examine the criminalization of a practice of New York’s poor known as “selling swipes” performed by so-called “swipers”. A hig...
The public transportation workers of New York City lost their lives to COVID-19 at a shocking rate in the spring of 2020, likely abetted by their employer’s resistance to allow workers to wear masks until mere days before a region-wide lockdown was declared. We might see this death toll as a tragic outcome of uncertainty in the face of the unpreced...
While Internet memes are often treated as artifacts which play with broad cultural elements, they can also take on distinctive meanings within narrow communities of practice or organizational membership. This article demonstrates how interrogating a certain interpretation of a meme, and a sort of humor found within it, can reveal elements of viewer...
In April 2024, New York City's Department of Investigation (DOI) released a report which discussed institutional abuses of parking placards and privileges by the New York Police Department (see note 1 below). A footnote in DOI's report indicated that DOI had obtained an official list of NYPD's so-called "Self-Enforcement Zones" (SEZs) or "Self-Enfo...
DOWNLOAD BELOW AT "PUBLIC FILE"
Bianchi v. THE CITY OF NEW YORK et al, Docket No. 1:23-cv-04456 (S.D.N.Y. May 27, 2023), Court Docket.
NYPD officer Mathew Bianchi sues NYPD for harassment, intimidation and career harm after he writes traffic tickets even to some people who present him with PBA cards, or whom simply know NYPD officials.
A close examination of the data characterized in the Panel report..
Prison scholars have long noted prisoners’ improvisation with materials and resources at hand (or bricolage) in ways that defy the prison regime. Yet longstanding scholarly perspectives which cite such bricolage as evidence for themes like “prison culture” or “resistance” have often distracted scholars from accounting for the specific features of o...
This issue examines technology-driven economic developments during the global COVID-19 pandemic in Europe, Asia, and the Americas. Specifically, the articles cover the ways that gig work, the platform economy, and remote work have evolved during the course of the pandemic. The issue leads with articles that chart the interplay of the platform econo...
This issue brings theoretically driven analyses to bear on the COVID-19 pandemic, a development which shines a singularly revealing light on some of the most significant political, cultural, and social trends of the 21st century. Leading off with three explicitly theoretical treatments of the pandemic, this issue directs several complementary theor...
Prison scholars have long noted prisoners' improvisation with objects and materials at hand (or bricolage) pursuant, often, to the most mundane sorts of practices like grooming, dressing, and eating. Yet longstanding perspectives situating bricolage as evidence for themes like "prison culture", "criminal sub-culture" or "resistance" have often dist...
This paper provides a summary of content in this special issue.
Preprint of Op-Ed published in the New York Daily News, November 6, 2021.
Keywords: Metropolitan Transportation Authority; Epidemiology; Environmental health; Subway workers; COVID-19; Transport for London; Research access
In October, researchers from the Department of Homeland Security and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology continued the...
The public transportation workers of New York City lost their lives to COVID-19 at a shocking rate in the spring of 2020, likely abetted by their employer's resistance to allow workers to wear masks until mere days before a region-wide lockdown was declared. We might see this death toll as a tragic outcome of uncertainty in the face of the unpreced...
In the mid 2000s, the operator of New York City's mass transit network committed more than a half-billion dollars to military contractor Lockheed Martin for a security technology capable, in part, of inferring threats based on analysis of data streams, of developing response strategies, and taking automated action towards alerts and calamities in l...
The tsunami of change triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic has transformed society in a series of cascading crises. Unlike disasters that are more temporarily and spatially bounded, the pandemic has continued to expand across time and space for over a year, leaving an unusually broad range of second-order and third-order harms in its wake. Globally,...
A primer in government data opacity, involving the Metropolitan Transportation Authority of New York city, extracted from working paper:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/343136003_Felony_vs_'Fuhgeddaboudit'_Technical_Crime_Street-Level_Privilege_and_the_Deception_of_Computers_in_New_York_City
An introduction to the selectable and neglectable technical logic of
criminalization, and its role in street‐level privilege extracted largely
from working paper found here: https://tinyurl.com/y2zyfkyn
An illustrative appendix & technical primer to working paper “Felony vs. ‘Fuhgeddaboudit’: Technical Crime, Street-Level Privilege, and the Deception of Computers in New York City”
(revision August, 2020)
Privilege afforded to a certain urban social milieu is an overlooked counterpoint to the aggressive policing and prosecution of the urban poor. This article investigates the divergent policing of two very similar activities which both involve manipulating information-containing objects to deceive computers deployed to read them. In the first case,...
In this article, we argue that new kinds of risk are emerging with the COVID-19 virus, and that these risks are unequally distributed. As we expose to view, digital inequalities and social inequalities are rendering certain subgroups significantly more vulnerable to exposure to COVID-19. Vulnerable populations bearing disproportionate risks include...
Book review of
Spaces of Security: Ethnographies of Securityscapes, Surveillance and Control,
edited by Setha Low and Mark Maguire. New York: New York University
Press, 2019. 280pp. $32 paper; $89 cloth. ISBN 9781479870066/ 9781479863013
Forthcoming, Contemporary Sociology
Please see prepreprint version, at
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/334683186_Caught_inside_the_black_box_Criminalization_opaque_technology_and_the_New_York_subway_MetroCard
This paper examines a case in which computer-readable objects manipulated with human hands were given the legal status of forgeries, based on the putative way that t...
This pre-print version includes notes to sources not included in the published version.
This chapter moves up from the toilet, at least metaphorically, to the subway. The author and a fellow sociologist spent numbers of months researching the New York subway system, stimulated by the post-9/11 campaigns to increase security for passengers. They focused on the way security interventions meshed—or failed to mesh—with existing procedures...
Through interviews and field observations, we examine how New York subway workers consume official workplace equipment, particularly how they informally deploy such artifacts towards individual and collective ends. We discuss the ways workers call on artifacts to manage routine concerns of work contexts — physical vulnerabilities, bureaucratic cons...
The events of September 11th bring urgency to problems of urban security, both in terms of finding ways to protect cities from attacks by terrorists and also protecting urban life from repressive measures that form in reaction to those attacks. We outline a rationale for urbanists to participate in analysis and policy-formulation on security issues...