Talk at Royal Holloway

I have been invited (and accepted) to give a talk at a workshop being held at Royal Holloway, University of London on the 15th of September. The workshop is the conclusion of the two year, ESRC funded study of radicalisation and the media and should be rather interesting.

I'll be talking about terrorism and its role in driving surveillance, primarily drawing upon issues of identity and identification. This will include identity cards, but also identification in the banking and financial sector, linked to anti-terrorist financing measures.

The threat of terrorism was one of the early stated reasons for the introduction of the identity card, this has largely been dropped, but not entirely. The focus is now more upon ‘terrorist use' of multiple identities, and blurring the lines between terrorism and organised crime. This comes out of my discourse analysis research, which studied government publications as well as news media accounts of surveillance – identifying particular frames through which surveillance technologies and practices are portrayed. The figure of the terrorist looms large in these frames.