This panel aims to engage with the blind spots that have been left untouched by the burgeoning and innovative literature on technology and security. The growing attention towards (research-) objects of technology has both opened previously unexplored areas of investigation, and questioned some of the more established ones. Hence, critical security studies’ focus is increasingly brought on the entanglements between the social and the technological, the practices of power that go beyond the purely discursive and the role of materiality. However, the relation between critique and technologies is not without tensions, and invites to discuss the very scope, functioning and meaning of both critique and technologies. We call for authors to engage with and position themselves in relation to some of the questions that arise from these tensions. For example, where does technology begin and end? So far, security scholarship has prioritised research on specific kinds of technology (algorithms, drones, biometrics, etc), mostly leaving aside seemingly low-tech practices. What are the premises and consequences of such a choice? Also, is there a proper way of reasoning and dis/ordering of the technological? Often, technologies are studied as merely a ruse of security professional to skip or foreclose the political. How security actors and scholars themselves morph and justify their relation to technologies? And how technologies participate to the active making of politics? Finally, what can we learn when critique takes into account dysfunctional technologies as a ‘routine’ element of the social, and not as an exceptional or comforting event?

NB: papers should be no longer than 5000 words, references included, and should clearly address and discuss some of the questions advanced above.

Please email your abstract to one or all panel convenors: Rocco Bellanova rocco.bellanova@vub.ac.be , Julien Jeandesboz J.A.Jeandesboz@uva.nl, Francesco Ragazzi f.ragazzi@fsw.leidenuniv.nl