Online Event

15.10.2020

'Making Europe through infrastructures of (in)security'

The Interdisciplinary Workshop is inspired by the need to investigate how infrastructures of in/security participate in the making of „Europe“.

12-13 November 2020, 6-8.30pm (CET) 

Keynote Speakers: Claudia Aradau (King´s College London), Ulrike Felt (University of Vienna), Annalisa Pelizza (University of Bologna), Johan Schot (University of Utrecht)

Organizers: Nina Klimburg-Witjes, Paul Trauttmansdorff, Pouya Sepehr (Dep. of Science and Technology Studies) Katharina T. Paul, Christian Haddad (Dep. of Political Science & Austrian Institute for International Affairs, oiip), Philipp Knopp (Dep. of Sociology) 

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With this interdisciplinary workshop, we aim to extend a longstanding concern with the processes and practices of infrastructuring in STS, sociology, political science, and other fields, to emergent forms of surveillance and securitization in Europe. Furthermore, the workshop is inspired by the need to investigate how different arrangements of infrastructures and practices of in/security participate in the making of “Europe” (Aradau, 2010; Pelizza, 2019).

Infrastructures have always been crucial objects of political promises, desirable futures, and collective imagination, and they have been instrumental for (re)configuring political practices and social values, for in/excluding certain groups of users or enacting populations (Grommé & Ruppert, 2019). Currently, we witness a return to infrastructures in the context of European policies and discourses of in/security. Examples include the so-called “Security Union” proposing technological interconnectivity and interoperability as solutions to contemporary threats, concerns with cyber in/security, infrastructural practices to govern borders and migrations, or projects around “smart cities”. In the most recent moment of infrastructural politics, the COVID-19 crisis has exposed contestations in manifold ways in which different countries in Europe and beyond are responding to in/security in relation to health diplomacy.

The workshop will bring these various threads together and collect papers that address the ways in which infrastructures of in/security are designed, envisioned and assembled, and how these infrastructuring practices co-construct “Europe” (Pelizza, 2019; Schipper & Schot, 2011).