Imaginaries of Security Innovations, (In)security Technologies and Criminalized Bodies: The Cases of Germany and Poland

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Abstract

This paper focuses on forensic genetic technologies used to investigate crime and explores social and ethical concerns as part of public understandings of innovations which differently render their social legitimacy and address expectations of public good. The research questions addressed here are: how do collective perceptions of what is an adequate and proportionate balance between potential risks and benefits of forensic genetic innovations differ across political cultures? How do they relate to imaginaries of insecure societies and “criminalized” bodies? Using and adapting Jasanoff’s analytical concepts of ‘civic epistemologies’ and Pfotenhauer and Jasanoff’s ‘imaginaries of innovation’ we will analyze public understandings of forensic genetic innovations promising security and control of risky social groups and the corresponding articulations regarding current security problems in two different national contexts.
Based on qualitative interview data with diverse stakeholders we portray the situations in Poland and Germany. Although Germany’s political dominant rhetoric increasingly welcomes the expansion of ‘law and order’ orientating forensic genetic innovation proposals, it also has recently experienced broader public controversy on emergent but contested forensic genetic technologies, also due to their claimed potential of criminalizing migrants. In Poland the prevailing political narrative emphasized the forensic genetics contribution to ‘modernized’ and improved efficacy of the criminal justice system, along with efficacy in the detection of criminals. Forensic genetic innovations have been accompanied by silently assuming public acceptance and public trust in the proportionate use in the Polish surveillance system.

Authors

• Helena Machado, Communication and Society Research Centre (CECS) | University of Minho, Portugal

• Nina Amelung, University of Minho