Keynote Speaker: Jef Huysmans
Fracturing politics. Towards a democratic analytics of (post-)surveillance societies
The lecture asks if the main repertoires of democratic critique of surveillance remain an adequate basis for a political analysis of modes of monitoring, registering, constructing, and circulating data and data subjects that are highly mobile, distributed and tied into daily practices. After introducing the distinction between panoptic surveillance and extitutional surveillance, the lecture explores the limits of anti-authoritarianism, transparency, and resistance as the key devices of a democratic critique of extitutional surveillance. A mismatch between the diffuse nature of surveillance and these repertoires of political critique invites exploring modes of democratic analysis that incorporate more diffuse conceptions of power and politics. The main components of the democratic analytics proposed here are understanding surveillance as social situations rather than a system and foregrounding uncoordinated disputes rather than resistance.
Jef Huysmans is Professor of International Politics in the School of
Politics and International Relations at Queen Mary, University of London. He
co-convenes the research cluster Doing International Political Sociology. As
Board member of the European International Studies Association he is
responsible for developing an Early Career Researchers Development portfolio.
He is best known for his work on the politics of insecurity, the
securitization of migration, critical methods, and international political
sociology. Currently he is working on security and democracy in times of
surveillance, an international political sociology of fracturing worlds, the
political life of methods, and the politics of movement.
He has published widely in leading journals
in international studies, politics, and European studies. He is author of Security Unbound. Enacting Democratic Limits
(Routledge, 2014), The Politics of Insecurity. Fear, Migration
and Asylum in the EU. (Routledge 2006); and What is Politics? (Edinburgh University Press, 2005). He edited with
Andrew Dobson and Raia Prokhovnik The
Politics of Protection. Sites of Insecurity and Political Agency.
(Routledge 2006); with Patricia Noxolo Community, citizenship, and the ‘war on terror’: Security
and insecurity. (Palgrave 2009),
with Xavier Guillaume Citizenship and
Security. The constitution of Political Being. (Routledge 2013), and with
Claudia Aradau, Andrew Neal and Nadine Voelkner Critical Security Methods. New Frameworks
for Analysis.
(Routledge, 2014)
Website: http://www.politics.qmul.ac.uk/staff/profiles/huysmansjef.html
Doing International Political Sociology: http://www.doingips.com