Oral Presentation Session

Reviewed by: General Anthropology Division

Primary Theme: The Political

(3-0195) Secure Adaptations: Engineering Safety, Evidentiary Practices, and State Resources

State securitizing practices are changeable. They adapt, or encourage adaptations, in relation to emergent configurations of tools, knowledges, and projects.


Papers in this panel affirm the insight that security is a key mechanism of large-scale coordinated systems of power and violence. A risk-- be it environmental, economic, or bodily-- can bring technologies, agents, materials, and practices into alignment in the name of security.  However, the kinds of coordinated ensembles that Foucault has called dispotifs are far from homogenous. Further, their relation to state power is not the only significance that security projects have.


With this panel we interrogate what else is at stake beyond entrenchment of state security apparatuses in encounters with the changing materials, logics, and goals of security rationalities. We interrogate how the framing principles and rationalities at play in different adaptive projects (such as resilience, care, risk, safety, security, and prosperity) manifest materially. As we explore multiple adaptive forms that securitization can entail, we celebrate the capacity of ethnographic research to attend to diverse practices that may go by a single name. Through ethnographic work in Mexico, South Africa, Pakistan, Australia and Jamaica, papers on this panel address adapting tools to new spaces and places; adapting institutions to emerging tools, technologies, and projects; communities who are adapting or failing to do so; and the work of expertise in processes of adaptation.

We aim to do the serious anthropological work of trying to inhabit and understand security worlds. In doing so, we seek to move our scholarship away from a space of simple diagnosis and critique. Here, we explore how we might produce and support openings for alternative futures with our work.

Chair(s)

• Juno Parrenas

  Assistant Professor
  Ohio State University

Organizer(s)

• Noah Tamarkin

  Assistant Professor
  Ohio State University

Presenter(s)

• Noah Tamarkin

  Assistant Professor
  Ohio State University

Organizer(s)

• Elizabeth Reddy

  University of San Diego

Presenter(s)

• Elizabeth Reddy

  University of San Diego

• Zeb Rifaqat

  University of California Santa Cruz

• Kimberley McKinson

  Postdoctoral Research and Teaching Associate
  University of Georgia

• Timothy Neale

  Alfred Deakin Postdoctoral Research Fellow
  Deakin University

Discussant(s)

• Andrew Lakoff

  University of Southern California

Presentations:

• 8:00 AM - 8:15 AM

  Security, Risk, and Data Adaptations: DNA Forensics in South Africa
  Noah M. Tamarkin – Ohio State University
• 8:15 AM - 8:30 AM

  Formalizing Security: Mexican Institutional Earthquake Safety Practices in the Making
  Elizabeth A. Reddy – University of San Diego
• 8:30 AM - 8:45 AM

  #PashtunLongMarch: Narratives of Prosperity, (In)Security, and Resistance in Pakistan
  Zeb Rifaqat – University of California Santa Cruz
• 8:45 AM - 9:00 AM

  Policing the Police: Cameras, Race, and US-Caribbean Relations in the Global Security Moment
  Kimberley D. McKinson – University of Georgia
• 9:00 AM - 9:15 AM

  Pyrosecurity: or, how to secure combustion on a flammable planet
  Timothy Neale – Deakin University
• 9:15 AM - 9:30 AM

  Discussion
  Andrew Lakoff – University of Southern California