From Open Geography:
“What Space for the Post-Security State?”
Tampa, Florida, 8-12 April 2014
Session organizers: Jeremy Crampton, University of Kentucky, Klaus Dodds, Peter Adey (Royal Holloway University of London)
Session sponsored by the Political Geography Specialty Group
This session takes up recent challenges to the logics of security (Neocleous, Vine, the CASE Collective), and seeks papers that open up new ways of thinking about security through critiques, oppositions, limits, resistances, or different kinds of security altogether (e.g. alter-security).
The goal is to collectively sketch the contours of a possible “post-security” state in which security’s costs as well as its benefits are more critically understood. Where today’s security is usually positioned as “more is better” and “safer rather than sorry”, our goal is not to necessarily reject security, but rather to identify a range of different interventions, critiques (perhaps “affirmative” McCormack, 2012), alternatives, that might think with security in productive ways or, indeed, new ways.
Our agenda is to seek positions that are not always outside or external to security apparatus, or so unaware of their location that the where of security is lost. We seek perspectives that unsettle the relationship between security and the state, such as its (potentially ever greater) privately administered projects and outsourcing. What manners of security are possible that might be creative hybrids of the state-private-communal spectrum? Can we identify alternative propositions to the pernicious investment of what Paul Amar has called the “human-security state” (Amar 2013), legitimized by appropriating a more progressive religious, gender, class and sexual politics?
Examples of possible paper topics include:
–ways in which the national security state is itself inherently insecure as evidenced through “moles,” spies, whistleblowing and “insider threats” such as Manning and Snowden;
–the environmental costs of security installations;
–the economic costs of security;
–military resource extraction;
–properties of violence (Correia, 2013);
–military landscapes;
–geographies of “baseworld”
–borderland securitization struggles;
–the admixtures of race, gender and rural-urban relations in modern incarceration regimes;
–health impacts of security including an estimated half million Americans with PTSD;
–“big data” and surveillance;
–histories of the security and surveillant state;
–private security and security outsourcing (security beyond the state);
–the sustainability of current practices of security or vulnerability and resilience to security.
– new languages or grammars of security and post-security
We seek papers that will address any of these or other related topics we have not listed. If in doubt, please contact us!
Our session deliberately seeks to continue and deepen interdisciplinary exchanges, and we welcome contributions from geography, political science, economics; sociology, environmental science, international relations, political sociology, psychology, computer science, the creative arts, and history.
If you are interested in participating, please submit an abstract of no more than 250 words to Jeremy Crampton (jcrampton@uky.edu). The conference discounted registration ends on October 23, 2013. For more information please see http://www.aag.org/cs/annualmeeting.
[H/T Progressive Geographies]