[ecrea] CFP book workshop – Visual aspects of security – CAST, Copenhagen, December 7-8, 2012

CFP book workshop – Visual aspects of security – CAST, Copenhagen,
December 7-8, 2012

We’re happy to announce the call for papers for the book workshop
‘Visual Aspects of Security’.
The workshop will take place on December 7-8th, 2012 at CAST, University
of Copenhagen and is aimed at producing an edited volume to be published
in late 2014.

During the last few years, visuality in general and visual media in
particular have become important parts of the practices that make up
notions and understandings of international security. At the same time,
‘making visible’ has become central to the conduct of war and
surveillance through the rapidly increasing deployment of satellites,
drones, and other technical means of seeing from afar. From another
viewpoint, visual representations have come to occupy a central role in
the development of political events – as evident in the 2009 Iranian
post-election crisis, in the constitution of WikiLeaks as a global
political actor through its release of a classified US military video in
april 2010, in the instant release of video and still images from the
killing of Osama Bin Laden, and in the 2011 ‘Arab Spring’ fuelled by the
circulation of video and images of protest. These are but a few
contemporary examples of visual representations that have greatly
influenced world politics.


Indeed, visuality has taken center stage – helped by profound changes in
the media landscape. The circulability of visuals as well as the range
of actors capable of producing visuals have been greatly expanded. In
such a situation, the irreducibility of visuals to words and the
inherent differences in these two modalities of political communication
have become an ever more pertinent problem for International Relations
research and teaching. Images, whether still or moving, always contain a
’surplus of meaning’ compared to any verbal interpretation of them – in
Foucault’s (1994) words, ”what we see never rests in what we say”. Any
verbal description of visuality – whether in scholarly work or
underlying everyday security practices – will thus necessarily also be a
reduction, an interpretation serving to fix the visual, to limit its
‘promiscuity’ and openness to interpretation (Barthes 1977).

The ’Visual aspects of security’ workshop attempts to produce a state of
the art view on security analysis that engages visuality, with a focus
on the abovementioned questions of irreducibility and the processes of
translation and appropriation between visuality and security. In this
way, it seeks to foster a more focused dialogue between the different
parts of the tantalizing sub-field of visual IR / security studies.
At the same time, it would allow for debate on how this particular
modality of the sensible not only determines what is visible and what is
not, but also how authority and truth-claims come about, and how they
are compared and evaluated. Through engagement with security via the
‘language’ or ‘code’ of the visual, the workshop is able to interrogate
how scholars in the field understand visuality as well as the economy,
grammar and performativity of visual articulation and
production/circulation of knowledge.


We therefore strongly encourage chapters to be explicit about the
connection between what the analysis ‘ sees’ and the way in which it
conceptualizes the visual and its relations to other modalities of
knowledge/ divisions of the sensible, etc.
As this is the first of two workshops envisioned for the book
production, chapters presented at the workshop are taken as work in
progress, but should present their argument and theoretical engagement
clearly across approximately 5-8000 words.

Abstracts of around 500 words are to be sent (tojuhvuo /at/ utu.fi)  and
(rsa /at/ ifs.ku.dk)  no later than November 10th, 2012. Participants will be
notified November 14th, 2012.

Paper givers will recive room and board and reimbursement of travel
expenses up to 300€.



Rune Saugmann



Visiting Researcher at Finnish Institute of International Affairs

(rune.saugmann /at/ fiia.fi)<mailto:(rune.saugmann /at/ fiia.fi)>

CAST, Centre for Advanced Security Theory
Uni of Copenhagen

http://cast.ku.dk/people/researchers/rune_saugmann_andersen_/


--------------------------

Dr. Maura Conway
School of Law and Government
Dublin City University
Glasnevin
Dublin 9
Ireland

Tel. +353 1 700 6472
(E-Mail.maura.conway /at/ dcu.ie)
Skype. galwaygrrl

Twitter: @TNMConference

Website:http://doras.dcu.ie/view/people/Conway,_Maura.html






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