Virtual Eyes That Condemn: Maceió as a Laboratory of Algorithmic Racism in Public Security
facial recognition; algorithmic racialization; technopolitics; public security; necrotechnology
This qualification project is situated within the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS), articulating contributions from the sociology of violence and Critical Race Theory to examine the impacts of algorithmic racialization in public security. The research starts from the recognition that technology is not neutral but operates as a power device, shaped by relations of race, class, and territory. Drawing on categories such as technopolitics, necrotechnology, algorithmic governance, and institutional opacity, the study investigates how automated identification systems— particularly facial recognition—function as contemporary mechanisms of containment, exclusion, and the management of Black death. The analysis rejects depoliticized narratives of innovation and seeks to expose how algorithmic infrastructures reorganize social control based on historical logics of domination. The research adopts a qualitative and critical approach, grounded in an expanded case study of the implementation of facial recognition in Maceió, Brazil. Four complementary methodological procedures will be employed: (1) document analysis of regulations and official discourses; (2) semi-structured interviews with public officials, experts, social leaders, and residents of monitored areas; (3) participant observation in surveilled public spaces and institutional settings; and (4) urban cartography to analyze the spatial distribution of surveillance in relation to markers of race, class, and territory. The data will be triangulated to reconstruct the conditions of emergence and the sociopolitical effects of the system, highlighting the regimes of selective visibility that sustain it.