[ecrea] Science as Culture (SaC) special issue: call for papers

Technosecurity Cultures

Guest Editors: Jutta Weber and Katrin M. Kämpf

‘Security’ has gained a central place in contemporary societies
preoccupied with dangers to their future. Policymakers, researchers and
mass media increasingly address a broad range of societal issues—from
migration and border control to crime or public health—as ‘security’
problems. Various technologies are promoted as solutions to the growing
demand for security (Ericson and Haggerty 2006; Bröckling et al. 2010).

This tendency has been analysed as a securitization process since the
end of the Cold War. New ‘threat‘ scenarios justified ‘defence‘
measures, especially the expansion of military forces. Through a broader
securitisation process, moreover, claims of existential threats to
society justify urgent extraordinary measures (Buzan et al., 1998:
24-25; Balzacq et al. 2010; Waever 1995). As means ‘to manage dangerous
irruptions in the future’, this strategy invests in technosecurity
architectures and extensive risk-management techniques (Aradau and van
Munster 2007). Indeed, ‘risk’ itself becomes a governance tool as well
as a problem-diagnosis (Dillon 2008; Aradau et al. 2008).

Security discourses and practices focus less on an empirical, causal
assessment of threats (Aradau et al. 2008). Instead they elaborate an
anticipatory maximum techno-security (Mattelart 2010), e.g. by urging
the pre-emption of ‘unknown unknowns’ (Daase and Kessler 2007). The
shift in security – from a proactive to a pre-emptive and preventive
mode – coincides with a search for technological superiority (Grusin 2010).

An entire ‘society of security‘ has been facilitated by advances in
surveillance technology and computer systems, handling large databases
on entire populations or on specific transitory groups seen as
suspicious or threatening. In techno-security culture, the invocation of
such 'dangers' justifies greater control over everyone‘s lives. Security
has been turned into a multi-fold, dynamic and complex sociopolitical
practice (Holert and Terkessidis 2003; Balzacq et al. 2010). Beyond
institutions and policy makers, many different agents—not just humans,
but also algorithms, concepts, machines, or cyborgs—produce meanings,
norms and ways of governing (Weber 2014). Thus techno-security cultures
are a multi-agential process shaping knowledge, policies, power
relations and experience around ‘insecurity’ problems.

There is a large body of research on securitization, pre-emption and
risk (Aas et al. 2009; Amoore 2013; Aradau 2010; Dillon 2008; Lemke
2011a/b; Pugliese 2010). Going further, we call for approaches to
technosecurity combining different fields – Science and Technology
Studies (or Software Studies) with Critical Security, Governmentality
Studies and/or Cultural Studies. These approaches scrutinize power
relations and governance modes. They can help to analyse technosecurity
as a multi-agential sociopolitical, cultural process.

Relevant fields of investigation include:
- Social sorting mechanisms embedded in algorithms, databases, border
control procedures, security architectures, predictive policing,
bio-security or bio-criminology
- Biopolitics of border securitization technologies
- Critical examination of bio-, and neuro-criminology technologies
- The biopolitical implications of surveillance medicine in processes of
securitization
- The technologies used to classify populations as at risk or as a risk
- Detailed analyses of the deployment of risk
- Attempts to pre-mediate security via algorithms, technologies, software


Abstracts and papers must follow the SaC guidelines, or else they will
be returned to the author:
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/authors/cSaC_Edit_Guidelines.pdf
Abstracts should be sent by 01.08.2015, as a basis to advise
contributors on the focus of papers.
Full papers should be sent by March 2016, though earlier submissions
would be helpful. Maximum length 7000 words; the revision may be given a
longer limit.

Contact: Katrin M. Kämpf, (kmkaempf /at/ mail.uni-paderborn.de)
<mailto:(kmkaempf /at/ mail.uni-paderborn.de)>


Dr Debra Benita Shaw
Reader in Cultural Theory/Programme Leader, BA (Hons) Cultural Studies
School of Arts & Digital Industries,
University of East London
Docklands Campus
1-4 University Way
LONDON E16 2RD

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