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Sensing Security: Sensing and the Making of Transnational Security Infrastructures - II

Fri, September 6, 9:45 to 11:15am, Sheraton New Orleans Hotel, Floor: Five, Grand Chenier

Abstract

The interplay of sensing and (algorithmic) sense-making marks an important, yet underexplored momentum in the social construction of security in increasingly digital societies. Sensory devices are not only producing multiple ontologies but also produce and mediate "macro-level" entities through information infrastructures in the making. This session seeks to understand the role of sensors and data infrastructures in the construction and interpretation of changing local and global socio-technical environments in recent discussions in science and technology studies, critical security and -data studies. Contributions explore how sensing devices - from satellites, drones and environmental sensor networks and digital sensing infrastructures - become invested with global and socio-political significance. A major question that drives this panel is how collective actors, such as states or international institutions, are not only informed by sensors but also shape and stabilize sensing practices and knowledge. Contributing to the emerging intersections between STS and security studies, presentations simultaneously attend to questions of macro-level security politics and micro-level sensing practices as being enabled and mediated through boundary infrastructures. The papers critically investigate sensors and sensory networks as situated security practices of infrastructure making, using both large-scale empirical accounts of historical and contemporary cases across the globe.

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