233043 SE Sensing In/security (2020W)

Almost anything and anyone can become a sensor, gathering and transmitting data about our world. Sensors are omnipresent and increasingly important elements in constituting and controlling contemporary societies in many domains of our lives. Built into (smart) cities, communication devices, and our clothes, attached to our bodies, to drones, satellites and cars, sensors have become our mostly invisible companions. In/security is one of the domains that we now find equipped, imagined and measured with sensors. Drawing on literature from STS and critical security studies (CSS) we will explore the interplay of in/security, sensors and sensing, thinking together how practices of infrastructuring are entangled with emergent modes of surveillance and securitization enabled by sensing practices and digital infrastructures. We will explore many by now classical STS issues such as monitoring, registering, representation and visualization, issues of technological mediation and human/non-human networks; the politics of knowledge and expertise, issues of classification and categorization as well as questions concerning the shaping of societies, states and technologies with a particular view towards sensors as security infrastructures. Most sensing activities operate in the background and do not require active or direct registration by those who are monitored. Therefore, we will engage with questions about the in/visibility of sensors, asking how sensors shape and how are they being shaped by the environment in which they are placed, and by the processes they (attempt to) render visible. By paying attention to sensors as an important part of the material equipment of security practices, this course will unpack sensing as situated practices of constructing, reconfiguring, stabilizing and disrupting in/security. Methodologically, this will be achieved through reading and discussing chapters of the book “Sensing Insecurity: Sensors as transnational security infrastructures” by Nina Klimburg-Witjes, Nikolaus Pöchhacker and Geoffrey C. Bowker (2020), by investigating practices of understanding and analyzing how we “see” sensors in the context of in/security (or how they see us…), but also how we can make sensors visible to ourselves. The course has a strong “hands-on” component, asking from every student to create a visual vignette (we will use the look-book approach outlined in the course) on sensors and in/security with material collected during the seminar.