2025 Theses Master's

smile! you’re on camera: stories of placemaking, surveillance, and carcerality from the Bronx bodega

Yi, Ki-Sang

This project explores processes of placemaking, surveillance, and political participation through stories from Bronx bodegas and through the frameworks of carceral geography, extrastatecraft, and actor-network theory. It attempts to understand the expansion of surveillance regimes into bodega spaces, not by observing moving objects, but by looking at the relationships of information flows, decision-making processes, and actor participation.

By embedding the analysis in the narratives of local bodegueros, community members, and public representatives, this project contributes to critical technology and surveillance studies by complicating the literature with the lived experiences, epistemologies, and infrastructures of feeling in and around bodegas in the Bronx.

In finding that surveillance as extrastatecraft is expanding into the immigrant spaces of bodegas without meaningful community engagement, this project concludes with a call to plan for abolition with intentional realignment of community organizations, bodega associations, and city institutions that center forms of collective care and protection as articulated by the communities they intend to serve.