Call for Papers ICCM Workshop 1

This is the opening workshop for an International Collaboratory on Critical Methods in Security Studies – a joint initiative between The Open University, University of Edinburgh and University of Sussex.

Call for participation

The Collaboratory aims to organize an international laboratory for critical methods for security studies and to stimulate collaborative research and writing as a method of critical security studies. Planned activities between October 2009 and 2011 include two workshops and a training school as well as ongoing debate and knowledge exchange via a collaborative research website.

To understand the significance of surveillance technology, counter-terrorism, risk management, advertising drawing on hazards, privatisation of security, and the politicisation of environmental catastrophe, security studies have developed innovative concepts and theories that draw attention to the social and political process of constructing insecurities and its consequences. Nonetheless, these critical accounts have been relatively weak on turning theoretical innovation into critical methodological enquiry. Engaging with the latter, however, not only considers how particular methods impact upon the object of research but also allows the development of new research ground in security studies. The Collaboratory, a laboratory on methods and a method of collaboration, emerged out of the need for methodological inquiry in security studies.

The first workshop aims to establish research clusters of four to five participants dedicated to exploring further specific critical methodologies for security studies. The following is an indicative list of methodologies

• discourse (including analyses of speaker-audience interaction as political struggle and the destabilisation of limits of a given problem)
• visuality (images and other forms of visualisation)
• everyday securitization through actor network theory, science and technology studies, feminist analyses of materiality and agency
• power struggles between security professionals
• history of security through genealogy
• political mobilisation through securitisation
• critical methodology by means of quantitative methods

Contributions dealing with a methodological issue emerging from critical work on security are welcomed. The workshop will be organised around a set of discussion topics based on the research interests in methodology expressed by the participants. Participants are expected to remain members of the Collaboratory for the duration of the project and to contribute to collaborative work within the collaborative research website.

Please submit an abstract (600 words) indicating area of methodological interest as well as full name, university affiliation and country where based, whether Ph.D. student or early career researcher (within five years of completing Ph.D.), and contact details by Tuesday, 15 December 2009 to Nadine Voelkner at nadine.voelkner@sussex.ac.uk

Notification of acceptance will be sent out by Friday, 15 January 2010. Accepted abstracts will be posted on the Collaboratory’s interactive webpage in advance of the workshop.

Ph.D. students and early career scholars will be fully funded by the Collaboratory. All participants will be required to submit one posting on the Collaboratory’s webpage prior to the workshop.

Organisers of the Collaboratory: Jef Huysmans and Claudia Aradau (Open University), Andrew Neal (University of Edinburgh) and Nadine Voelkner (University of Sussex).