Doing (In)Security. How Fear and Securi...

I am concerned with the way (in)security policies, media narratives, histories, imaginations, tools, infrastructures, emotionality and the like influence our everyday lives and our perception of self and other, and how they make a lasting impression on how we conduct our lives and our-selves. In the project, I ask how we are governed and govern ourselves and others, and how, thereby, life chances are being limited and extended, because of security considerations and fantasies. In short, this project seeks to understand (in)security if not comprehensively and all-encompassing, but from many different angles, each selected to highlight a specific aspect of the security theme that goes beyond the traditional understanding of(in)security as state-centered, as something that simply happens to “us”. Instead, I seek to advance the theoretical concept of security from the perspective of cultural anthropology, thereby drawing upon the discipline’s strengths and virtues: anthropological theory, an actor-centered approach, ethnographic methodology, a desire to understand and not rely on pre-formulated theories, but use them as starting points in order to get an idea of “what is going on”.