Spaces of Terrorism and Risk

I'm going to be one of the guest editors for a special issue of Space and Culture.
This should be posted on their blog fairly soon, publication date will be 2011, which seems far away right now.

Space and Culture: Spaces of Terror and Risk

The interlinked discourses of terrorism and risk serve both to structure policies and drive the design of technologies, with implications ranging far beyond traditional issues of national security and international relations. Both the threat of terrorism, and the policies and technologies intended to counter it, impact upon the built and urban environment, potentially changing the nature of the space itself, as well as the way people use, inhabit and think about places and spaces. This special issue intends to map these developments and provide theoretical accounts of such trends and phenomena.

Terrorism acts as driver for diverse policies of pre-emption, prevention and prediction, including the substantial growth of surveillance. Frequently, terrorism is framed in terms of risk, with certain places, populations and activities identified as risky or suspect, and thus a proper target for monitoring and intervention. The logic of counter-terrorism is risk averse. Attempts to secure space against terrorism or other associated risks and natural hazards raise questions about what exactly is being secured and for what purposes. Which populations or activities are included or excluded from a space? What uses of space are privileged, and which are brought under the rubric of terrorism? The threat of terrorism, as well as counter-terrorism responses, impact the aesthetic and affective dimensions of architectural and urban design, and could delimit movement and experience within the space of the city. These threats and counter-measures also have profound implications for urban ethical and political life. To what extent does the risk of terrorism foster a politics of secrecy as opposed to openness? Do these conditions prevent the development of a potential ethics of hospitality or cosmopolitanism?

The spaces affected by terrorism and risk are not just physical, but also include virtual spaces such as the internet. These spaces too are designed and constructed in ways that are affected by conceptions of risk and terrorism – the decentralised communications potential of the internet is seen by governments not only as a site of radicalisation, but also of ideological conflict. Physical spaces are themselves divided up into zones of control, ranging from physical and electronic security cordons to ‘free speech zones’ and the fortified ‘Green Zone’ of Baghdad.

We seek papers (up to 8,000 words combining theory and empirical research, although shorter case studies may also be accepted) from various disciplines and theoretical standpoints that explore the following areas:

• Surveillance, monitoring and visualisation
• Technologies of control, terrorism prevention or risk management
• Borders, marginal and liminal spaces
• Urbanism and Terrorism: cities, people and infrastructure
• Methods of risk or hazard assessment, and risk based decision making
• Strategies of the securitisation of space
• Policy issues and unorthodox readings of security
• Information technology, risk and terrorism.
• Historical examples of the effects of risk and terrorism logics upon spaces and places.
• Case studies or comparative accounts
• Architectural and urban design practices
• Political and ethical considerations of terrorism and counter-terrorism

These topics are offered as suggestions, and we are also open to other subjects not outlined above that speak to space, terrorism and risk as a special theme of scholarship. Deadline for Submission is 4^th December 2009.

Guest Editors:

David Wills – University of Birmingham – d.a.wills@bham.ac.uk

Cerwyn Moore – University of Birmingham – c.moore.1@bham.ac.uk

Joel McKim – Concordia University – jmckim@alcor.concordia.ca

things to write about

There are so many things I need to write about here. Unfortunately, I have little to no spare time, so I'll just have to make some notes and come back to them.

• how the talk on surveillance at Worcester 6th form went - young people and surveillance
  
• Communications Data Act (or variant on that) and its surveillant provisions
• BNP membership data loss
• the first week in a year without a surveillance story in the UK press (24/11/08) - possibly.
  
• thoughts and notes on surveillance theory coming out of thesis corrections - Deleuze, Guattari and collective assemblages of enunciation (something I've been thinking about for years, and now is going in the final version of the thesis).
  

Frankie Boyle on Identity Theft.

"Identity cards wont stop identity theft. They just mean that when it does happen...you're f**ked"

"Oh no!, I've lost my passport. I'll need new eyeballs and finger transplants."

clip here -the above is towards the end.

the implicit and explicit political information in social networks

Good news today. The paper that I presented at Towards a Social Science of Web 2.0 in York in 2007, written with Stuart Reeves, (then of the University of Nottingham Mixed Reality Lab, now at Glasgow) will be featuring in the next but one issue of the journal British Politics.

'Facebook as a Political Weapon' uses a case study approach to look at the way that social networks contain both explicit and implicit data, as well as the questions this raises for politics. It's going to be featured as part of British Politics' 'beyond the mainstream' section, where the editors are attempting to showcase research work that impacts upon British politics, but isn't narrowly focussed upon party politics, elections and the like.

It was fun working on the paper with Stuart, and it'll be good to see that it gets a home somewhere. I think its important to produce research which crosses disciplinary boundaries, or at the very least, uses some IT to do informed social research.

Stuart is an interesting fellow, and his research page linked above is worth checking out. He's worked with Blast Theory, the artistic group which John McGrath (Author of 'Loving Big Brother') talked about with enthusiasm at the InVisibilities surveillance studies conference in Sheffield this year. Also he had his viva a week before mine, and also passed with corrections.

linking and referencing.

I just realised, I have a tendency to write references in academic documents as if they were hyperlinks. Apparently they're not.

mini stylistic rant

I had my PhD viva recently. I passed, with corrections. This is a good thing.
I have a list of corrections that I need to make to the document, provided by the two examiners.
I've started making these changes, and there's one that's taking a while.

The examiners had issue with the use of quote marks in the text, which weren't not direct quotations. They refered to these as scare quotes and have asked me to remove them. There's a lot of them. I'm diligently removing them all, and its taking me a while.

But, there's a reason they're there. My research looks at discourse. Now there are two ways to produce an analysis of discourse. One involves attaching every quote to a specific author. However, there are many regularities in discourses, which are spotted by the analysis, but come straight from multiple points in the discourse. They recur so frequently, that attaching them to a specific author is actually not representing the full spread of the mentality.

So if a sentence was talking about 'identity' in a discourse, the intention would be to show that this was the way a specific concept was being utilised in a specific group's discourse, rather than giving credibility to the statement. The attempt is to put a caveat around the use of the term.

Also there are times when you just need to say 'this is how people say something' but it's not true, that's not the way the world is. The one I just deleted was talking about 'clean' identities. Clean is a metaphor. Somebodies identity can't really be clean.

or am I just dragging back a realist ontology and epistemology into my thinking?

through punctuation?

speed camera article

Currently working on the (final?) draft of the speed cameras paper for submission next week. Just running through some of the protest group websites looked at in the paper, and found this image on the Association of British Drivers. Nice bit of subvertising or detournement. A 'rearticulation' of speed cameras as a form of crime rather than a technology of public safety.