Journal articles

Aradau (2010) Security that matters: critical infrastructure and objects of protection

Critical infrastructure protection is prominently concerned with objects that appear indispensable for the functioning of social and political life. However, the analysis of material objects in discussions of critical infrastructure protection has remained largely within the remit of managerial responses, which see matter as simply passive, a blank slate. In security studies, critical approaches have focused on social and cultural values, forms of life, technologies of risk or structures of neoliberal globalization.

Rorty (1982) Method, Social Science, Social Hope

Rorty explores the issue of method in social sciences, how it came to be equated with "objectivity", "rationality" and "rigor". He is expressing some concerns about the "hermeneutic turn" choosing Dewey against Foucault. 

Waterton (2010) Experimenting with the Archive: STSers As Analysts and Co-constructors of Databases and Other Archival Forms

This article is about recent attempts by scholars, database practitioners, and curators to experiment in theoretically interesting ways with the conceptual design and the building of databases, archives, and other information systems. This article uses the term ‘‘archive’’ (following Derrida’s Archive Fever 1998/1995 and Bowker’s Memory Practices in the Sciences 2005) as an overarching category to include a diversity of technologies used to inventory objects and knowledge, to commit them to memory and for future use.

Leigh Star (2010) This is Not a Boundary Object: Reflections on the Origin of a Concept

There are three components to boundary objects as outlined in the original 1989 article. Interpretive flexibility, the structure of informatic and work process needs and arrangements, and, finally, the dynamic between illstructured and more tailored uses of the objects. Much of the use of the concept has concentrated on the aspect of interpretive flexibility and has often mistaken or conflated this flexibility with the process of tacking back-and-forth between the ill-structured and well-structured aspects of the arrangements.

Stuvoey (2010) Human Security Research Practices: Conceptualizing Security for Women’s Crisis Centres in Russia

In ongoing discussions surrounding the issue of human security, the security of individuals has become entangled in conceptual debates that are preoccupied with notions of appropriate variables, measure- ments and issue areas. This article suggests and illustrates a basis for human security research that is distinct from such objectivist empiri- cism. A case study of crisis centres in northwest Russia is used to demonstrate that human security is not only a matter for objectified generalizations, but also a question of practices.

Coutin and Hirsch (1998) Naming Resistance: Ethnographers, Dissidents, and States

Ethnographic analyses of political dissidence are deeply implicated in the political contests about which ethnographers write. A comparison of the authors' fieldwork among dissidents in Argentina, Kenya, and the United States reveals both the differing dynamics of contests over thepolitical and the complex ways that ethnographers are situated within such contests.

Ortner (1995) Resistance and the Problem of Ethnographic Refusal

Ethnography of course means many things. Minimally, however, it has always meant the attempt to understand another life world using the self-as much of it as possible as the instrumentof knowing. As is by now widely known, ethnography has come under a great deal of internal criticism within anthropology over the past decade or so, but this minimal definition has not for the most part been challenged. This essay traces the effects of what I call ethnographic refusal on a series of studies surrounding the subject of resistance.

Shalom (2010) Theoreticians’ obligation of transparency: when parsimony, reflexivity, transparency and reciprocity meet

Hultin (2010) Repositioning the Front Lines? Reflections on the Ethnography of African Securityscapes

Neumann (2007) "A Speech That the Entire Ministry May Stand For," or: Why Diplomats Never Produce Anything New

This is a great article that is written from Neumann's own experience as a speech writer in the Norweigian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. I have put it in the library because I think it offers insight into the kind of research that can be realised through critical research techniques, and in particular through engaging with our own situadness and the experiences it generates.