Interview with Professor Sarah Igo
Professor of History at Vanderbilt College of Arts and Science, Sarah Igo visited Centre for Privacy Studies in May 2023. She gave a lecture on the U.S. Social Security number and how it reflects the ways Americans across the last century imagined their affiliation to the U.S. state as well as to their own ‘personal’ data. The lecture spurred some fruitful discussions on privacy, technical infrastructures, and modern citizenship. We are grateful for Sarah’s visit and the scholarly conversations and discussions it enabled. We have interviewed Sarah about her visit and the role of privacy in her research.
Could you explain what role privacy plays in your own research?
I have spent almost a decade trying to pin down how and why privacy came to be such a persistent, although shape-shifting, concern in the United States since the mid-nineteenth century. The book that resulted, The Known Citizen: A History of Privacy in Modern America, encompasses debates about new technologies (like photography and fingerprinting), new fields (like family therapy and market research), new sensitivities (whether around biomedical research or state databases), and new practices (like “coming out” and confessional memoirs). All of these developments, in some way or another, altered how people could be known to others—and hence, common understandings of “public” and “private.”
This research sparked new questions for me about the role of data systems and data politics in shaping even the most seemingly intimate of realms in modern societies: birth, death, health, marriage, finances, and perhaps even subjectivity. My case is the U.S. Social Security number, or SSN, which was introduced in 1936. How did this number, a bureaucratic tracking device, become—in some instances—deeply personal and meaningful to those it identified? How did it blur lines between the citizen and the state, family fortunes and bureaucratic designs, individual freedoms and technical infrastructures, the highly personal and the avowedly impersonal? And what stories might it tell about where we find—and how we manage and experience “privacy”—in advanced capitalist societies?
Did your conversations with the scholars of Centre for Privacy Studies contribute with new perspectives on privacy and how can these inspire your own research?
We had such lively conversations during my visit! It was fascinating to learn, first of all, about the differences between Danish and American (and as it turned out, also Swedish and Portuguese) ways of numbering and monitoring populations. I also came away with much food for thought from scholars working on early modern state structures, who helped me clarify what was truly new about something like the Social Security system and its official mode of recognizing individuals. More than a month later, I am still working through the many pages of notes I took during my seminar and following up on leads and questions that emerged in discussion.
Did the interdisciplinarity of Centre for Privacy Studies play a role in the conversations you had with the scholars and in what way?
It was wonderful to glimpse during my visit how much conceptual territory we all had in common despite working in different centuries, subfields, and national contexts. Talking with scholars at the Centre working in architectural and religious history—areas I have not (but probably should!) foreground in my own work—led me to ponder the full range of ways, from the ethereal to the material, that past cultures have conceptualized privacy. And being able to engage with scholars working in an earlier period exposed the real promise of the field of privacy studies as an interdisciplinary crossroad. Researchers I met at the Centre may have been working on monasteries or royal courts rather than modern welfare systems, but it was clear that we had a shared set of questions, and I’d say even vocabularies, that made it possible to think easily together.
You are a scholar within the fields of American history, law, political science, and sociology, what does the combination of these fields enable in your own research and academic career?
I have always been a wanderer among academic fields. Many of the questions that interest me most almost seem to require conceptual borrowing from areas outside my own field of history. It’s also true that intellectual history is already in many ways an interdisciplinary venture, since if you are interested in the development of ideas, you need to root yourself in their disciplinary as well as social and political contexts. When I was writing my first book, on statistical imaginations in the twentieth-century U.S., I needed to read up on statistical methods (past and present), familiarize myself with survey and polling techniques, and situate what I was finding historically within scholarship on communications and the sociology of knowledge.
My privacy book took me even farther afield as I had to delve into aspects of feminist epistemology, literary study, philosophy, and science and technology studies as well as legal studies. I joke that a “retraining” fellowship I received, which enabled me to spend a year in law school classes and in conversation with new colleagues, in fact slowed down the publication of my book. It was because that setting pried open for me so many new angles on privacy and privacy rights—as well as whole bodies of scholarship that I might not otherwise have encountered. Slowing down to absorb all that new work did delay my book, but it also I think made it better. Another benefit was that it launched me into intellectual friendships, conferences, and associations that continued beyond the book project.
Is there anything from your visit to Centre for Privacy Studies that surprised you or stands out in particular?
Beyond the beauty of the surroundings and the warm hospitality I experienced during my visit – both of which I greatly appreciated – I was struck by what a tight intellectual community the Centre seems to have fostered among researchers with extraordinarily far-ranging interests, from biblical interpretation to secular courts. It was evident that scholars in residence first of all truly know one another’s projects. Moreover, they are discovering insights for their own work in places they might not have looked, had it not been for the interactions at the Centre. As I mentioned to director Mette Birkedal Bruun, the fact that this group has produced co-authorships and genuine working collaborations is rare – truly the gold standard for this kind of interdisciplinary project. So you are doing something very precious there!