This is about Mathias Klang. For a more formal curriculum vitae, click here.
I’m an Associate Professor and Associate Chair in the Department of Communication and Media Studies at Fordham University in New York, where I’ve worked since 2017. My research sits at the intersection of surveillance, digital rights, and platform power. Or, to put it more plainly, I study the ways technology shapes who gets to speak, resist, and move freely, and the ways we have come to accept that shaping as normal.
My path here has been genuinely transatlantic. I started as a researcher in Sweden, completed a doctorate at the University of Göteborg in 2006 on how technology regulation affects democratic participation, led Creative Commons Sweden for nearly a decade, and eventually made my way across the Atlantic, through UMass Boston and a visiting fellowship at Penn’s Annenberg School. I hold tenure and the Swedish Docent title from two institutions, which is the kind of credential that requires a lot of explaining at American dinner parties.
My current work focuses on surveillance in everyday life: how monitoring technologies get normalized through the language of care, convenience, and self-improvement until they stop feeling like surveillance at all. My book Surveillance Microcosms (McGill-Queen’s University Press) develops the concept of the “surveillance microcosm” — the intimate monitoring arrangements of home, family, and body — and traces how these connect upward to corporate platforms and, from there, to law enforcement. A companion project, Without Consent: Animal Surveillance and Extractive Power, extends this framework to non-human subjects, asking what happens to surveillance theory when the subject cannot be informed, cannot refuse, and cannot negotiate the terms of their own monitoring.
I live in Philadelphia with my partner, who is also a media scholar, and our dog Syrsa, who is monitored considerably less than the average American.
