Gary T. Marx

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Gary T. Marx (born 1938) is professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and retired from the University of Colorado in 1996. He has worked in the areas of race and ethnicity, collective behavior and social movements, law and society and surveillance studies.

Contents

Background

Marx was born on a farm in central California, raised in Los Angeles from the age of 2, and attended John Marshall High School. [1] He has degrees from UCLA (1960) and University of California at Berkeley (PhD in sociology, 1966: Protest and Prejudice: The Climate of Opinion in the Negro American Community). [2] He taught at Harvard University in the Department of Social Relations, moving to MIT in Urban Studies and Planning (1973-1994). From 1992 he spent 4 years as head of the Sociology Department at the University of Colorado at Boulder. [3] [4]

Marx was married with children, to Phyllis Anne Rakita Marx for over 50 years, until her death in 2013. They moved to a farm on Bainbridge Island near Seattle in 1996. [5]

Contributions

Marx's early work was on race relations in the United States, during the Civil Rights Movement. He has also contributed to studies of collective behavior and social movements, and studies of policing and policing methods.

He worked extensively on surveillance issues, illustrating how and why surveillance is neither good nor bad, but context and comportment make it so. He has sought to create a conceptual map of new ways of collecting, analyzing, communicating and using personal information. Explanation and evaluation require a common language for the identification and measurement of surveillance's fundamental properties and contexts (e.g., the new surveillance, surveillance society, maximum security society, surveillance creep; surveillance slack, the softening of surveillance, the myth of surveillance, neutralization and counter-neutralization, and four basic surveillance contexts: coercion, contracts, care, and cross cutting, unprotected "publicly" available data). [6]

His work has appeared or been reprinted in over 300 books, monographs and periodicals and has been translated into Japanese, Chinese, Czech, French, Italian, Spanish, Hebrew, Dutch, German, Russian, Polish, Hungarian, Greek, Turkish, Portuguese, Persian, Macedonian, Slovak, Swedish, Belarusian; and other languages.

Marx has been a consultant to, or served on panels for, national commissions, the House Committee on the Judiciary, the House Science Committee, the Senate Labor and Human Resources Committee, the Government Accountability Office, the Office of Technology Assessment, the Justice Department, and other federal agencies; state and local governments, the European Community and European Parliament, the House of Commons of Canada, The National Academy of Sciences, the Social Science Research Council, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the U.K. Association of Chief Police Officers, public interest groups, foundations and think tanks.

Awards

Major works

Selected newspaper articles, letters, and op-eds

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References

  1. http://web.mit.edu/gtmarx/www/whatsit.html
  2. https://sociology.berkeley.edu/gary-marx-1960
  3. http://web.mit.edu/gtmarx/www/whatsit.html
  4. http://web.mit.edu/gtmarx/www/geis.html
  5. http://web.mit.edu/gtmarx/www/whatsit.html
  6. "Entry on Gary T. Marx in The SAGE Encyclopedia of Surveillance, Security, and Privacy; Bruce A. Arrigo (ed.) SAGE Publications Inc., 2018". Gary T. Marx. Retrieved June 6, 2020.

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