Collaboratory in Critical Security Methods
The International Collaboratory on Critical Methods in Security Studies is an ESRC funded project (RES-810-21-0072)
Method 1: Visuality
Images and symbols are inextricable from security studies. The way we perceive threat determines where and how societies and soldiers apply force, and reciprocally, it is usually through images and symbols that the application of force is contextualized, justified and rationalized. The purpose of this methodological cluster is to analyze the security implications of the perceptual process as a whole, that is, how individuals physically perceive, how what they perceive is generated and propagated, and in what way meaning is attributed to that which is perceived. More
Vuori (2010) A Timely Prophet? The Doomsday Clock as a Visualization of Securitization Moves with a Global Referent Object
Vuori, Juha A. (2010), "A Timely Prophet? The Doomsday Clock as a Visualization of Securitization Moves with a Global Referent Object". In: Security Dialogue Vol 41, pp. 255-277
There have been numerous calls to include images in the analysis of securitization and the social construction of security issues. The present article answers these calls by examining a longstanding process of securitization in which speech acts have been interwoven with a powerful symbol. Looking into the past and a visualization of possible futures, the article traces the resets of the so-called Doomsday Clock of the Atomic Scientists as securitization/desecuritization moves with a global referent object.
Kangas (2009) From Interfaces to Interpretants: A Pragmatist Exploration into Popular Culture
Kangas, Anni (2009), "From Interfaces to Interpretants: A Pragmatist Exploration into Popular Culture". In: Millennium: Journal of International Studies Vol.38 No.2, pp. 317–343
Anni Kangas provides one means of approaching popular culture from the viewpoint of pragmatics, more specifically the theory of signs and semeiosis by Charles S. Peirce. Such an approach could be one avenue for approaching visuality and symbols within critical studies of security as well.
Visuality and War - reporting on a workshop
The Research Programme Securities at the Centre for Citizenship, Identities and Governance (www.open.ac.uk/ccig/programmes/securities) organized a two day workshop on visuality and war. It brought together scholars from art history, film analysis, international relations, sociology, and archeology to discuss the visualization of war.
ISA 2011: Call for Participants: (Ab)using Images? Methodological approaches to the study of perception and visuality in critical security studies
Call for Participants for a Proposed Panel:
(Ab)using Images? Methodological approaches to the study of perception and visuality in critical security studies
The Social Life Of Methods
31 August-3 September 2010, St Hugh's College Oxford
Call for Papers
During the past century and longer, social scientific methods have come to be extensively deployed in government, administration and business, as well as in academic research. Maps, enumerations, surveys, interviews, indicators, software and visualizations proliferate. The aim of this conference is to consider how we can best understand the agency of social science methods in both shaping, and themselves being affected, by economic, social and cultural change, both historically and in the current context when digitalization poses specific challenges to established repertoires of social science methods.