Short Abstract

This panel explores how infrastructures—from civic systems to security technologies—materialize and distribute risk, (in)security, and polarization. We examine how these material forms both stabilize and fracture social worlds.

Long Abstract

Contemporary forms of governance are increasingly organised through infrastructures that sense, mediate, and materialize risk, security, and insecurity. From roads, railways, leeves, grids to data centers, drones, spyware, and ballistic technologies, these material systems shape how societies imagine and navigate uncertain futures. They render danger knowable and actionable by enabling measurement, modelling, and circulation of data; they allocate protection and exposure; and they crystallize new forms of expertise, responsibility, and citizenship. At the same time, these infrastructures do more than manage uncertainty, they actively participate in producing and intensifying social and political polarizations. Through structuring access, visibility, and vulnerability, both civic and security-oriented infrastructures consolidate boundaries between safety and threat, order and disorder, citizen and stranger.

This panel brings together anthropological and STS-informed perspectives to examine how risk and security become materialized, politicized, and contested through infrastructural arrangements across domains such as urban services, mobility, digital governance, policing, disaster management, humanitarianism, and border control. We invite ethnographically grounded contributions that trace how infrastructures, tools, and weapons both stabilize and destabilize social worlds: how they shield and expose, secure and endanger, connect and divide. In following the breakdown, maintenance, repurposing, or circulation of such material forms, the panel asks how the infrastructures of (in)security make polarization tangible, and how moments of contestation, improvisation, or reappropriation may open possibilities for alternative futures.

Possible topics include (but are not limited to):

• The governance of uncertainty and anticipatory politics of (in)security

• Expertise, modelling, and data in producing risk and polarization

• Affective and moral economies surrounding danger, safety, and threat

• Sensorial regimes and evidence-making in security practices

• Maintenance, repair, collapse, and ambivalence in everyday infrastructures

• Mobility, logistics, and platformization in distributing (in)security

• The circulation of security tools across policing, military, and humanitarian fields

This Panel has 1 pending paper proposal.
Propose paper