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Short abstract:

To understand security technology, we must begin speculating about its design and making. We claim that the social sciences must integrate methodologies of making, designing, and fabricating into its everyday praxis to both understand technoscientific friction and intervene in those processes.

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.