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Paper short abstract

How does the siren make you feel? Based on sensory ethnography in Sweden and Denmark, this paper examines how siren tests act as rituals of anticipatory governance, shaping public space and creating embodied experiences of security, danger, memory, and anticipation.

Paper long abstract

Siren tests function as recurring “peacetime rehearsals” for testing the functionality of the outdoor warning system, producing a shared temporal moment in which urban space is briefly reorganized around the sound of warning. While contemporary research on early warning systems often focuses on digital emergency technologies and algorithmic predictions, this study foregrounds the embodied and sonic dimensions of outdoor warnings systems through which societies prepare for unknown crises.

Using qualitative methods such as sonic ethnography, participant observation, and interviews, this study examines the testing of sirens in Sweden and Denmark as a sociotechnical ritual of anticipatory governance. Drawing from anticipation studies and science and technology studies, the analysis identifies several moral complexities of anticipatory governance through sound. For instance, injunction, the expectation that people should be willing to anticipate; anticipatory preparedness, preparing as if the danger is already here, and the ecology of testing, in which the siren becomes pervasive, ubiquitous, and continuous in the public space.

The findings highlight a wide range of embodied experiences: safety and trust for some, irritation or indifference for others, and in some cases memories of conflict and disaster. The data furthermore illustrate how the decades-long outdoor siren system complements newer digital emergency infrastructures and is entangled with both old and new technopolitical infrastructures of national civil and military defense, as well as with broader discourses of global uncertainty and instability.