Send message to Author

Paper short abstract:

Following a new materialist perspective to critical security studies, this paper draws on the notion of atmospheres to better understand how everyday experiences of (in)security manifest in people's bodies and are mediated through religious objects, sounds, and images.

Paper long abstract:

Brazil’s urban environments are home to a number of informal securitizing actors including drug trafficking organizations and paramilitary groups who operate as de facto authorities. These non-state or para-state actors draw on a combination of coercive methods, popular cultural practices, and religious references to consolidate and legitimize their power and authority in a particular neighborhood. In this contribution, I draw on the notion of atmospheres (cf. Anderson 2009; Adey 2014) to better understand the relationship between the spiritual world and the everyday politics of security provision in Rio de Janeiro. Atmospheres, because of their fleeting and temporary nature, are well-suited to analyze the uncertainties and unpredictabilities experienced by my research participants in their everyday lives. The notion also allows for a better understanding of the different ways in which these uncertainties and unpredictabilities are mediated through religious objects, sounds, and images and manifest in people’s bodies. Moreover, atmospheres are not just ‘out there’ but can be carefully curated through the right disposition of people and things. My research is based on 10 months of fieldwork in a cluster of neighborhoods located in the North of Rio de Janeiro which is effectively controlled by armed actors of the Pure Third Command. By placing my research within a broader context of “political exhaustion” (Willis 2023) in Rio’s urban peripheries, I argue that the atmospheric and the sensorial also shape people’s experiences of the suburban environment as a place that can be (re)made beyond the power of state and non-state armed actors.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract:

The paper explores how material devices and infrastructures, as well as their sensorial perceptions, “do” forms of (in)security that self-perpetuate and reify precarious Roma in the peripheries of Rome as dangerous subjects to be forever policed.

Paper long abstract:

In Italy, precarious Roma are often relegated to the so-called campi nomadi – encampments characterized by faulty infrastructure and service neglect, and sources of powerful territorial stigma for their inhabitants. This Roma population has been subjected to securitarian modes of governance, where security measures, institutions, and mechanisms were created to police campi nomadi inhabitants: surveillance cameras and monitoring systems, special police forces, regular institutionalized patrols around the camps.

I ground my argument in ethnographic fieldwork on formal and informal policing of the Roma carried out in the peripheries of Rome, and examine how material devices and infrastructures, as well as their sensorial perceptions, “do” forms of (in)security that self-perpetuate and reify the Roma as dangerous subjects to be forever policed. My argument proposes to analytically and methodologically move past the distinction between things and the meanings of insecurity attached to them in various contexts, exploring how matter and the sensorial perceptions of it quietly fabricate insecurity in complex and unpredictable chains of associations. In doing so, I engage with literature on new materialism and with sensorial anthropology to critique the exclusive focus on speech acts contained in the so-called Copenhagen School of critical security studies, and explore the value of anthropological approaches grounded in ethnographic fieldwork to critical security studies.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract:

This paper critically examines the fears surrounding emotional biometric surveillance within the context of state-corporate migration control concerning smartphone user refugees crossing EU borders. The paper highlights the potential challenges to sensory migration profiling by digital algorithms.

Paper long abstract:

This paper critically examines the fears surrounding emotional biometric surveillance within the context of state-corporate migration control concerning smartphone user refugees crossing EU borders. Rooted in a critical security studies perspective, this study explores the complex intersections of sensory security screenings, such as digital sentiment analysis and self-censorship within the context of migration control practices. Sentiment analysis is the process of analyzing digital text to determine if the emotional tone of the message is positive, negative, or neutral. Today, companies have large volumes of text data like emails, customer support chat transcripts, social media comments that are screened by automatic language prediction models to profile suspicious smartphone users. This paper assess how sentiment analysis is used to monitor digital communication or assess emotional states of suspected migrant groups. As a reaction to these monitoring processes, the paper also discusses the harms of self-censorship that refugees may adopt in response to sensory profiling techniques. By critically examining the fears of refugees surrounded by sensory surveillance techniques, this ethnographic reflection investigates the emotional dimensions of security technologies and how it feeds collective chilling effects among conflict refugees.

The paper emphasizes the need for ethical considerations in the deployment of sensory securitization by emotional biometric screening and highlights the potential challenges to sensory migration profiling by digital algorithms. Accordingly, this paper underscores the urgent need for a nuanced understanding of the emotional landscapes shaped by these behavioral control technologies.

Send message to Authors

Paper short abstract:

The war in Gaza enters Israeli and Palestinian spaces through the senses. Here we will discuss the role of the senses in the (re)construction of feelings of security and fear in civilian spaces in Israel/Palestine, which are influenced and formed by what happens on the battlefield nearby.

Paper long abstract:

At the time of this writing, the war in Israel/Palestine has been raging for over 3 months. The war, its violence, but also its sights, smells, and sounds are everywhere. In the form of death and horror, but also through more ‘daily’ experiences, such as the sounds of the air raid sirens and the sight of weaponry everywhere. The war in Gaza enters Israeli and Palestinian spaces through the senses.

Attacking the senses has been a mode of warfare that goes back many years. The Israeli military is known to use teargas, Skunk with its terrible smell, and the ‘Shofar’ with its high-pitched sound as deterrence of protestors in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, for example. However, smell and sounds are also sources of conflict and security in more civilian settings, where they play a role in the making of the (enemy) other. During times of emergency, this is intensified and feelings of (in)security and fear are (re)constructed by, for example, the sounds of sirens warnings that rockets are on their way, but also around the sight of the huge amount of weapons that have been flooded into the Israeli civil space in the last months. For some, feelings of security increase with this sight, for many others the opposite is true.

In this paper, we will discuss the role of the senses in the (re)construction of feelings of security and fear in civilian spaces in Israel/Palestine, which are influenced and formed by what happens on the battlefield nearby.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract:

Drawing on ethnographic engagement with de-escalation training providers and de-escalation practices in Berlin shelters for unhoused persons, this contribution queries how bodies under stress sense and are sensed through lenses of risk and care.

Paper long abstract:

In many facilities providing health and social welfare services in Germany, de-escalation is trained, mandated and practiced to mitigate the risk of staff injury in cases of aggressive and potentially violent behavior. In this contribution, I examine how the body and the senses are mobilized by de-escalation practitioners in order to recognize danger. To do so, I draw on ethnographic engagement with de-escalation training providers and de-escalation practices in Berlin shelters for unhoused persons.

Fraught with the potential of physical harm, de-escalation is profoundly embodied, with aggression, tension and fear locatable in and expressed through individual bodies. Situations must be assessed every time anew, through what Berring, Hummelvoll et al. (2016) term experiential knowing: “generated in face-to-face meetings in direct encounters.” The body figures in these encounters as a source of knowledge and mode of knowing, grounded in perception and experience. Yet (de-)escalating bodies also figure as bodies under stress, with altered cognitive and sensorial capacities. Trainers often describe these changes in neurophysiological terms, referencing hormones such as adrenaline, and the work that they do in altering alertness, memory, perception and motor skills. Stress in de-escalation lore connotes danger, as it is understood to compromise the capacity for self control and rational thought, but also a condition to be cared for in order to mitigate risk. Thinking bodies as material-semiotic nodes (Haraway 1991), I query how bodies under stress sense and are sensed through the lense of de-escalation efforts amidst questions of securitization, structural violence and multiple care crisis.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract:

Drawing on fieldwork with a local police unit in a socially disadvantaged Copenhagen suburb, this paper investigates how various kinds of affective and bodily intimacies shape the everyday logics of local policing and security provision.

Paper long abstract:

‘Proximity,’ ‘community,’ and ‘local embeddedness’ have become policing buzzwords in recent years (e.g. Biden 2020; Jassal 2020; Pinto & Do Carmo 2016). Such scalar configurations, however—‘the community’, ‘the local’, etc.—are rarely neutral markers of socio-material magnitude, but tend instead to operate as politicized short-hands for particular kinds of relations between places, people and the institutions that govern them (Tsing 2000, Howitt 1998). This is where this paper, which draws on fieldwork with a local police unit in a socially marginalized Copenhagen suburb, takes its cue.

Placing concrete relationships between police officers and local residents at the centre of attention, the paper reflects ethnographically on how various kinds of affective and bodily intimacies (Berlant 1998, Povinelli 2006) shape the everyday logics of local policing and security provision in the Danish capital. The paper’s intervention, then, is to move beyond familiar analytical figures such as power/resistance or state/citizen in order to highlight the various emotional and corporeal registers involved in ‘close encounters’ between police and residents. In this regard, the concept of ‘intimacy’ plays a dual role for the paper: 1) as an empirical concept, as police officers have been tasked with enacting nærhed vis-à-vis local neighbourhoods (nærhed literally means ‘proximity,’ but comes with ‘intimacy’ as a strong double connotation), and 2) as an analytical heuristic that encourages us to explore how policing practices produce, and are themselves conditioned by, complex mutual attachments that transgress institutional spaces through their inscription in officers’ as well as residents’ social and material biographies.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract:

With an ethnography of a ‘haunted house’ and the presidential residency in inner city Santiago we analyze articulation of experiences of insecurity with crime and violence and the expectations of socio-economic mobility. Here, crime jinxes the unspoken expectations of gentrification

Paper long abstract:

The paper focuses on two houses that are situated in Barrio Yungay, a central historic neighborhood in Santiago de Chile, predominately inhabited by lower to middle income families that coexist with poorer migrants and professionals and artists that are drawn to the area due to its heritage status as ‘typical zone’ and the constant, albeit paradoxically unfulfilled hopes of gentrification. The first is, la casa tomada, which is one of the neighborhood's occupied houses and a feared site because it is associated with the drug economy, prostitution and other illegal activities. The second house, located nearby the casa tomada, is the home of Gabriel Boric, Chile’s president who surprisingly decided to live in Yungay.

We use the houses as ethnographic heuristics to analyze the tense articulation of experiences of insecurity with crime and violence and the expectations of socio-economic mobility. Both topics are key arenas in Chile: fear of crime has been a constant since the end of the dictatorship and many consider democratic rule as an impediment for controlling crime. On the other hand, people expect that democratic rule will lead to a reduction of inequality and they hold high hopes of social mobility. We argue that these intersecting feelings become spatialized sensorial experiences and a concrete lived materiality. The houses are material indexes of lived fear, hope and unfulfilled expectations that people refer to, engage with and seek to interpret - most with the purpose of staying safe and others in order to safeguard their economic investments.

Send message to Authors

Paper short abstract:

We explore the rites of distinction, surveillance/control, and hospitality in entrances of gated condominiums and apartment buildings. The socio-material worlds of guards and concierges and their rich social and cultural knowledge are central for understanding political urban security projects.

Paper long abstract:

In recent decades, socio-systems of security and control and its countless technical devices that have structurally and socially pervaded Brazilian cities. Although security guards and concierges play an important role as social and technological mediators in daily life, their practices and security perceptions received little attention when compared to other security professionals. Due to an urban structure and a market that favours private security, these agents are responsible for access control to buildings while ensuring that everything follows a certain order that we call the urban hospitality-security complex. Professionals are responsible for protecting people and property, handle surveillance devices and environments, while also purveying a sense of safety, hospitality, and cordiality. We are interested in how guards and concierges perform macro and micro socio-technological politics of distinction, control, and hospitality in cities such as Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo.

In this presentation, we will explore the rites of distinction, surveillance/control, and hospitality in entrances of gated condominiums and apartment buildings. We argue that the socio-material worlds of guards and concierges as well as their rich social and cultural knowledge are central for understanding political urban security projects. These professionals participate in the reproduction of social, racial, gender, and material hierarchies. They make sense of them from within the structures and daily experiences of inequality. We will show how their observations, critics, gossip, suspicions, sensations, and imaginations mediate the socio-techniques of distinction, control, and hospitality that constitute the urban security-technological socialities pervading contemporary Brazilian urban lives.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the material culture of safety gadgets, like tasers, and how these objects are positioned as gendered and exist as technologies of enchantment (Gell 1999). It further elucidates cuteness as an aesthetic of (in)security and explores these gadget’s agency in gender representation.

Paper long abstract:

"I don’t have my taser, but I’ve got My Kitty." Marysol

In times of insecurity and uncertainty, my ethnographic research in Brooklyn, NYC, has found women, including trans women, and queer and non-binary folks turning to non-lethal weaponization in the form of safety gadgets; self-defence weapons, such as tasers, pepper sprays, alarms and kubotans. These tools are frequently advertised to women and the LGBTQ+ community and as such express certain gender and sexuality stereotypes, from pink spiky cat ears to cute mushroom-shaped tasers. This paper will attempt to ‘un-do’ the complex relationship between such safety-gadgets and their user’s conceptions of their body, as supposedly both gendered and insecure.

Furthermore, this paper will deconstruct cuteness as an aesthetic category and its role in gendered experiences of security and safety in the city. The cute and the pink beguile, (Yano, 2013) and these safety gadgets exist as technologies that enchant and entrap (Gell, 1999), doing things in the world, beyond aesthetics, including gender representation and performativity. From captivating visuals to the jolting crackle of a taser, this paper dissects such sensations of (in)security, whilst further investigating the digital presence of such gadgets, as they are heavily advertised on Instagram and TikTok. Moreover, this paper will also explore the role of the body in personal security, as a voice, as a material presence, and as a means of defense. This will be situated in the context of Brooklyn and my interlocutor’s dialogues about their safety and security practices and experiences, both on-and-offline.