About Marc
Marc Schuilenburg is Professor of Digital Surveillance at the Erasmus University Rotterdam. Marc’s work focuses on the way in which public safety and policing is changing due to the rise of AI. How can AI improve the prevention and detection of crime? To what extent does AI raise new questions with respect to public values? Marc is interested how surveillance and AI tools can be designed with care and sensibly to democratic values such as fairness, accountability, privacy and transparency. Special attention in his research is given how surveillance and AI tools are understood, articulated, experienced or even resisted by various actors, and how these experiences can have real consequences in daily practice.
Marc is the author of Making Surveillance Public (2nd edition, 2025). In this book, he 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.
He has published the critically and highly acclaimed monographs Hysteria (Routledge, 2021), The Securitization of Society (NYU-Press, 2015) and Mediapolis (010-Publishers, 2006). He has edited eight books, including The Algorithmic Society (Routledge, 2nd edition, 2027) and Positive Criminology (Eleven, 2014). His PhD on assemblages in security governance was awarded the triennial Willem Nagel Prize by the Dutch Society of Criminology. He has been a visiting professor in New York (John Jay College, 2013) and Ipswich (University Campus Suffolk, 2014-2020).
Marc’s research has 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, Arte, and others
During his writing, he listens to Alice Coltrane, Radiohead, Actress, Scratch Lee Perry, Autechre, MBV, Pharoah Sanders, and Morrissey. He lives in Rotterdam, the Netherlands.