This international workshop on Re-imagining Security Labour will explore the significance and global expansion of the security industry. Through interdisciplinary, hybrid, academic, and creative conversations, we will focus on security tasks, infrastructures, and narratives, with special attention to security laborers.
This workshop responds to the problem that security and its everyday practices are not analysed frequently enough through the conceptual framework of labour. Similarly, labour is rarely seen as a means through which notions and understandings of (in)security are reproduced. Accordingly, we seek to emphasize how workers themselves are prime conduits through which to view the inner workings of security regimes, and the way they affect the people who carry it out.
The core aim of this workshop is to bring together conceptual discussions in the fields of security and labour to foreground and better understand their complex entanglements. We propose that viewing security as a form of labour and viewing certain kinds of labour as a form of security, can provide new insights. This framework can elucidate the ways security regimes are produced, the mechanisms by which they are maintained, and the everyday tasks required to diffuse them widely throughout society. We are concerned with the ways that workers, consumers, and the public become complicit in maintaining these regimes, as well as the impact that security industries have on the lives of their employees.
In addition to academic pieces and essays, we welcome creative interventions and imaginative approaches to understanding security and labour. This workshop is the start of a series of sessions that will culminate in a multi-authored edited volume on ‘Reimagining Security Labour’.
The workshop is organized by the Re-imagining Security Labour Theme Group currently based at NIAS. The members of this group are Ed Schwarzschild, Tessa Diphoorn, Erella Grassiani, and Winifred Poster.