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- Convenors:
-
Jasper van der Kist
(University of Antwerp)
Rocco Bellanova (Vrije Universiteit Brussel)
Francesco Ragazzi (Leiden University)
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- Format:
- Combined Format Open Panel
Short Abstract:
This panel explores tinkering as a conceptual tool and methodological practice for immersive exploration of opaque security environments. It invites papers that highlight tinkering in socio-technical security practices and more experimental formats that incorporate it in their own research practice.
Long Abstract:
Research on socio-technical security practices is multiplying within STS and at its intersection with other disciplines. Most of this literature refutes linear and deterministic accounts of technology, which would view technologies as the most obvious solutions to a security problem, or as the natural extension of prevailing ways of doing security.
At the same time, approaching security practices in this manner leaves us with important conceptual and methodological questions, such as: How do we make sense of this situated, material, fluid, and experimental character of security, notably when more classical forms of fieldwork are not possible in the security field?
In this panel we suggest that tinkering may be a way to address the opacity of security practices and technologies. Following up on theoretical and empirical insights coming from STS, critical security studies, and digital humanities, we want to grasp the potential of tinkering – not just as a conceptual tool but also as a methodological practice, paving the way for an immersive exploration of socio-technical security environments.
We can still learn from classical STS studies that have employed tinkering to unveil the everyday and experimental understandings of technoscientific work. But in more recent years, we have seen more inventive research strategies emerge in digital humanities, such as hacking, prototyping, and reverse engineering. The combined format of the panel therefore accepts two types of contributions:
1. Paper presentations, reflecting on how tinkering can provide a conceptual vantage point to study how complex, messy and even conflictual security practices can actually be productive, thus allowing us to unpack how such ‘security tinkering’ transforms power relations;
2. Experimental formats, that would embrace tinkering in our own research practice, that is, develop ways of knowing that bring us closer to the everyday frictions and workable solutions that security actors have identified as crucial.
Accepted contributions:
Session 1Vanessa Ugolini (Vrije Universiteit Brussel) Francis Hunger
Long abstract:
In its pursuit of further security cooperation, the European Union is about to set up a new data infrastructure for the circulation of biometric data. In November 2023, the European Union (EU) institutions reached a political agreement on the so-called Prüm II regulation. This initiative foresees, among other things, the creation of a novel IT system that reorganizes the transnational circulation of DNA and fingerprint data in the context of law enforcement cooperation, and creates new avenues for the exchange of facial images. In perspective, this novel infrastructure superimposes existing socio-material and legal practices of European security (foreseen under the existing Prüm framework), some of which have never been fully implemented as expected. Bringing Media Theory into the traffic between STS and Critical Security Studies, this paper explores how plans for a novel data infrastructure are both generative and remediative processes. That is, how a major policy program does not only promise to create new practices, but in fact hits the ground running even before the start of its implementation, and this is because it must deal with legacy systems (or their lack of implementation). Paraphrasing Karin Knorr (1979), this contribution aims to unearth the slow tinkering of European security, whereby attempts to overcome existing and foreseeable socio-material and legal frictions are as important as debates about ideals and values. In the spirit of the DATAUNION project’s multimodal approach, the paper explores how we can study the coming into being of European security infrastructures through both qualitative and art methods.
Alice Whelan (Vrije Universiteit Brussel) M Leal Causton (Vrije Universiteit Brussel)
Long abstract:
In Critical Security Studies, STS concepts and methods are frequently mobilised to trace the making of the European Union’s security architectures. This has led scholars to attend to the practices of actors traditionally “invisible” in these systems. The ubiquity of data in European sociotechnical security practices has been acknowledged. However, less is known about the sites and nature of everyday “data work” and its productive role in European security infrastructures. Data work can be explored as referring to the tasks related to the production, structuring and/or control of data for a given purpose. Given the opacity of these sociotechnical environments in security contexts; this paper engages with “tinkering” as an experimental methodological practice. To substantiate the nature and sites of “data work” in European security, attention is paid to the profiles, labels, and nomenclatures of data workers across member states. Descriptive terms and roles that describe those who are drawn into working on the European Passenger Name Record and Advance Passenger Information systems are collated. “Data workers” profiles in terms of role descriptors and regulatory documents are traced. These are taken as digital traces found through publicly available information and used to generate textual data. To explore this textual data, we will use digital methodologies stemming from media studies and social sciences to spark reflection on the visible “data work” sustaining large scale information systems. This scoping can shed light on the frictions that characterise the unfolding of European security infrastructures through a focus on the heterogeneity of data work.
Tomas Percival (Goldsmiths, University of London)
Long abstract:
The proposed presentation introduces a practice-based methodology to investigate socio-technical systems, focusing on UK prisons. Specifically, examining the OASys risk assessment tool and its influence on incarcerated individuals. This approach uncovers the complex interplay of power, decision-making, and governance inherent in the OASys system.
The methodology involves collaboration with former prisoners to examine their OASys files and understand the impact of these socio-technical systems on their prison experiences. This process yields thematic audio clips that offer counter-narratives to the discourse produced by the security apparatus. The presentation will detail the methodology, including:
1. Collaborating with formerly incarcerated individuals to request access to their prison files.
2. Reviewing these files together with participants.
3. Conducting interviews with participants about how the categorisations generated by these files affected their prison experience and the level of control they faced.
4. Transcribing and coding these interviews to highlight key themes.
5. Editing the transcripts to create thematic 'scripts' based on these themes.
6. Working with participants to re-record these 'scripts', producing short thematic audio clips.
7. Publicly presenting these counter-narratives in exhibition formats.
This approach uncovers the material and experimental nature of prison security practices, emphasising the everyday experiences of those directly impacted. The presentation will be a combined format. The academic analysis provides a conceptual understanding of OASys within the socio-technical landscape, while the audio narratives offer an immersive look at the lived experiences under this system.
Requested Time: 20-30 minutes (each audio clip is 4-5mins)
Francesco Ragazzi (Leiden University)
Long abstract:
This paper examines a security partnership between the Netherlands National Police, the Municipality of Amsterdam, and the Amsterdam Arena Stadium, aimed at experimenting with algorithmic security technologies (crowd recognition, drone surveillance, hotspots management, etc.). The "fieldlab" co-opts the notion of tinkering — a method traditionally associated with informal, bottom-up experimental problem-solving — to formalize an advanced strategy for urban security. The paper first explores the specific bureaucratic object of the "fieldlab", laying out its specificity in relation to other forms of multi-agency cooperation in the field of security. It looks in particular at how the notion of "experimentation" is used to develop policies in a gray area, in which civil rights, privacy and other dimensions of fundamental rights are potentially suspended, in the name of innovation. In the second part, the paper reflects on the possibilities of thinking about a critical alternative to the "fieldlab", when many classic strategies of contestation are already incorporated in the official security policy.
Jessica McClearn (Royal Holloway, University of London) Reem Talhouk Rikke Bjerg Jensen
Long abstract:
Through embracing 'messy' methodologies we highlight the importance of tinkering as a co-design process with participants to better understand everyday practices and relational aspects of security. We highlight the potential of ethnography and design research as reflective practices and as a point to tinker from, drawing from our experiences conducting fieldwork in post-conflict contexts of Lebanon and Colombia. The intersection of STS with HCI and computer security literature sheds light on the concept of tinkering as a process of adaptation to ensure the methods we use are situated in the context of study which adapt to the needs and practices of the participant community. Through adapting our research practice to methods related to the research context, we apply the notion of tinkering as care-work to foster greater trust with participants. Simultaneously, this allows us to further immerse ourselves as researchers to understand situated socio-technical security practices.
This research also seeks to explore tensions which tinkered methodologies hold in academic institutions as a challenge to traditional ideas of research design and rigor. Furthermore, we explore our own experiences of creating space for tinkered methodologies within institutional frameworks of health and safety and ethics, while taking utmost protection of participants and researchers. Tinkering therefore is a process of translation across the institution, the field and in producing academic output. This exploration of tinkered methods allows security researchers from cross-disciplinary backgrounds to reflect on their practice and adopt experimental methods to foster trust, challenge academic frameworks and further situate their work.
Jonathan Luke Austin Anna Leander (Geneva Graduate Institute)
Long abstract:
In this paper, we seek to further conceptualize this claim. To do so, we begin by adapting Haraway’s understanding of speculative fabulation, alongside work in speculative design, to develop the concept of ‘speculative fabrication.’ Our goal in joining the terms speculation and fabrication is to explore the possibility of entangling the playful and improvisational affordances of speculative inquiry with the materialist commitment implied by acts of fabrication. In this, we seek to move beyond the sometimes too dematerialized visions of speculation that can “denounce the world in the name of an ideal world,” to speak with Isabelle Stengers, and embrace instead an ethos of ‘affirmatively tinkering’ with technoscientific praxis. In order to make these claims, we draw on examples from a project focused on a series of speculative fabrications designed to augment humanitarian security practice in different ways. We dwell specifically on how such speculative fabrication requires 1) a commitment to the risk of proposing ‘operative constructs’ (Stengers) that exceed notions of speculation-as-critique or speculation-as-play, without neglecting the virtues of reflexivity, and which engage in techno-security praxis affirmatively, and 2) a commitment to generating the form through the cultivation of collaborative frictions that mix transvocational and transdisciplinary insights in ways that can productively alienate us from the safe terrain of the known.
Delf Rothe (Institute for Peace Research and Security Policy at the University of Hamburg)
Long abstract:
The proposed contribution explores how forms of tinkering with emerging digital technologies could open new avenues for studying the security implications of climate change. In the field of climate security, the term "tinkering" often carries a whiff of danger. For many, the idea of "tinkering with nature" is a symbol of the human hubris and Prometheanism that have led to the current global crisis of the Anthropocene. This critique is commonly directed toward climate- or bio-engineering experiments but is increasingly being applied to the use of AI and other digital technologies in the governance of climate risks as well.
In this explorative paper, I provide another, affirmative reading of tinkering with technology in the area of climate security. I hold that existing imaginaries of climate (in)security suffer from a "status-quo" bias, projecting existing Western discourses of insecurity into an uncertain future. Progressive alternatives, such as ecological or posthuman notions of security, exist as academic concepts but hardly find their way into political debates or bureaucratic practices on climate change and security. In the paper, I explore how tinkering with digital technologies, including digital maps/GIS, data visualization, agent-based models, or generative AI, could lead a way out of this impasse. In this reading, digital technologies would be less of an instrument for predicting, preventing, or managing climate risks. Instead, they will be approached as "thinking-tools" to develop more imaginative and open future scenarios, and to speculate about potentials for agency amid the unfolding planetary crisis.