Problematising Danger

Hola,
me acabo de cruzar con una página web donde se encuentran todos los contenidos en audio del cuarto y último seminario de las ESRC Seminar Series- Contemporary Biopolitical Security, organizado por la red Biopolitics of Security, dedicado específicamente al tema Problematising Danger.

El seminario tuvo lugar en UK el pasado mes de febrero de 2011 en el King’s College y no me puede parecer más actual para cualquiera del ámbito STS que se interese por las catástrofes medioambientales, las emergencias sanitarias y sociales, la(s) crisis económicas, etc.

Aquí os pongo el resumen, y espero que os interese

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‘There is no liberalism without a culture of danger.’ (Foucault, 2008: 67)

FOUCAULT, M. 2008. The Birth of Biopolitics: lectures at the College de France, 1978-1979,
Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan.

Threats and risks have become the preferred categories for imagining contemporary security. Practices such as defence, border control and the surveillance of populations, insurance, risk profiling to identify suspicious subjects, and risk assessments to protect objects and systems such as critical infrastructure, rely heavily on well-established paradigms of security. Discourses and practices of threats and risks, with their allied technologies of measurement and calculation, however, relate to the wider problem of danger and its allied concept of ‘uncertainty’. Thinking ‘danger’ relates to understandings of uncertainties, otherness of being, and spaces and environments of protection in excess of those accounted for in the language and metrics of discourses of threats and risks.

What happens, then, if the analysis of security resorts to understandings of ‘danger’, ‘dangerousness’, and processes of ‘endangerment’? Is it possible to think security by referring ideas of danger to understandings of life, livelihoods and lifestyles, instead of ready-made ‘objects’ of security such as sovereignty, territory, the nation-state, citizens, borders, and sociological categories such as class and gender? Is it possible to think security in relation to danger away from utilitarian economic categories such as cost-benefit analysis, risk calculus, and rational choice?

The workshop aims to explore these questions and to challenge participants to wonder if current policy security priorities such as terrorism, climate change, weapons proliferation, resilience and migration can be thought in relation to ‘danger’ outside discourses of threats and risks.

In the first three workshops of this seminar series we began to explore an agenda for contemporary biopolitical security research around problems such as mobilities and circulations, resilience, values and processes of valuations in relation to the technologies through which lifestyles and livelihoods are treated as referents of security. In this fourth workshop we intend to spark a conversation around the implications of thinking dangerousness in relation to security and life.

The workshop is based on participants’ work and invites a reflection on the following questions:

– How are ideas of danger constituted? What forms of ‘data’, ‘information’, and ‘knowledge’ are involved in constituting a dangerous subject or a dangerous environment?

– What are the preconditions for understanding endangerment in and how do they question the ‘new security challenges’ of for example, terrorism (and cyber-terrorism), proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, climate change, and health pandemics?

– Can discourses and practices of security be different if reflections on the consequences of endangerment are advanced?»

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Como os decía, todo el audio está disponible en: Backdoor Publishing Company – Problematising Danger