UK Emergency Services Show

Today I attended the ‘Emergency Services Show’ in Coventry.  The show provides a forum for in which emergency services personnel (from front-line services and local resilience teams to the Cabinet Office) can network with other and, more significantly, purchase from the many vendors selling a range of equipment and products geared to the needs of emergency responders.  The show is interesting in many respects, not least insofar as it quite clearly displays the relation between commerce and the production of ‘insecurity’, as advertisements, provocative displays and a barrage of flashing lights collectively operate to communicate that we live in exceptionally risky times in order to encourage the sales of security products.

This is my second year in attendance, a fact which I felt allowed me to approach the exhibition which a much more composed and directed ‘game plan’.  Last year, I must admit, I got pretty overwhelmed: The size of the event, paired with a very fuzzy idea of `what I wanted to get out of it`, paired with a cool response of the representatives of the more elite civil contingencies and security services themselves (who I was hoping to network-in with for future interviews etc.) all left me feeling a little disoriented.  I returned however, this year with a different approach developed from the lessons I learnt from my initial visit. (I should mention that I`m increasingly identifying exploratory visits to be invaluable in the emergent construction of field work research methodology).  The approach consisted of concentrating my attention primarily on the vendors of (in)security products and equipment rather than the civil contingencies reps.

To begin with, the vendors were much more approachable than many of the civil contingencies reps.  This, of course, should come as no surprise: the vendors, as good sales-people, were there to chat, answer questions, offer contact details for future discussion, and, more than anything, push their product to whoever was interested.  The Civil Contingencies reps, on the other hand, were less inclined to talk (especially to lowly PhD researchers!) having nothing to sell in the first place, and recognizing that the ability to withhold information is itself a symbolic gesture of their authority.  So going to the sales people is firstly a way of circumnavigating the communication and access barriers which face security researchers.  Additionally though, I found the approach to be beneficial insofar as it directed attention to the technologies of security themselves as a way of conducting critical research in security studies.   You find very quickly that once you start asking what any given technology does—i.e. how it works—you begin to gain really deep insight into the problematics around which current emergency responses are organized.   The vendors of these products have a very acute sense of the challenges faced by the emergency services, the role of technologies in addressing these problems, and the general direction in which industry is looking to move in the next 5-10 years—not least because many vendors formerly worked either in the military or in the emergency services.  Vendors also speak openly about the military origins of many of these technologies and products allowing one to trace their development from military research and design to their deployment in civil emergencies and/or sales to commercial enterprises.