Elspeth Van Veeren
I am an Associate Professor in Global Politics in the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies (SPAIS) at the University of Bristol and a Resident at the Pervasive Media Studio at the Bristol Watershed.
My work is focused on US security cultures and policies, particularly with relation to the US Global War on Terror and its legacies. First, through a study of torture, security common-sense and popular culture, and then a detailed study and theorisation of visual and material power associated with detention and interrogation practices at Joint Task Force Guantanamo (Security Collisions: Guantánamo and the Materialisation of Post-9/11 Security, Routledge, forthcoming) in order to understand how controversial security practices are made visible and therefore meaningful as part of US security discourses.
My current research focus is a study of secrecy: in relation to the second decade of the US Global War on Terror and the emerging US security doctrine of ‘shadow wars’ and 'manhunting', but particularly in the interconnections between personal and everyday secret keeping that takes gender and race as central to secrecy, and as key to understanding power on national and transnational scales.
I completed my PhD in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Bristol (2011) and since then I have been an ESRC Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of International Relations at the University of Sussex (2011-2013), a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Centre for Advanced Security Theory at the University of Copenhagen (2013), and a Banting Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Centre for International and Security Studies at York University in Toronto (2013-2014). With Dr. Lucy Easthope (Lincoln) I completed an ESRC-funded project on forensic science and post-Cold War security discourses. Before academia, I worked in research laboratories as a research assistant, served as an officer in the Canadian Naval Reserve (full and part-time), and worked for Bristol City Council as a Civil Contingencies/Emergency Planning Officer (Humanitarian assistance).
My published work has appeared in a range of edited volumes and peer-reviewed academic journals including New Political Science, International Political Sociology, Review of International Studies, and the Journal of War and Culture Studies.
My work is focused on US security cultures and policies, particularly with relation to the US Global War on Terror and its legacies. First, through a study of torture, security common-sense and popular culture, and then a detailed study and theorisation of visual and material power associated with detention and interrogation practices at Joint Task Force Guantanamo (Security Collisions: Guantánamo and the Materialisation of Post-9/11 Security, Routledge, forthcoming) in order to understand how controversial security practices are made visible and therefore meaningful as part of US security discourses.
My current research focus is a study of secrecy: in relation to the second decade of the US Global War on Terror and the emerging US security doctrine of ‘shadow wars’ and 'manhunting', but particularly in the interconnections between personal and everyday secret keeping that takes gender and race as central to secrecy, and as key to understanding power on national and transnational scales.
I completed my PhD in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Bristol (2011) and since then I have been an ESRC Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of International Relations at the University of Sussex (2011-2013), a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Centre for Advanced Security Theory at the University of Copenhagen (2013), and a Banting Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Centre for International and Security Studies at York University in Toronto (2013-2014). With Dr. Lucy Easthope (Lincoln) I completed an ESRC-funded project on forensic science and post-Cold War security discourses. Before academia, I worked in research laboratories as a research assistant, served as an officer in the Canadian Naval Reserve (full and part-time), and worked for Bristol City Council as a Civil Contingencies/Emergency Planning Officer (Humanitarian assistance).
My published work has appeared in a range of edited volumes and peer-reviewed academic journals including New Political Science, International Political Sociology, Review of International Studies, and the Journal of War and Culture Studies.
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The second part lies in understanding that, like visual politics, invisibilities operate in multiple modes that depend on different, and often competing, understandings of how knowledge and common sense are constituted. To fully grasp the breadth of what visual politics offers is to understand the different ways in which the visible is produced, ordered and normalised. But for this to work, it also means understanding how invisibility is similarly differently constituted. This means, for example, understanding the multiple ways invisibilities are conceived. This chapter therefore offers an initial typology of four modes of invisibility (though these categories are not exhaustive and frequently intersect): invisibility as barrier, inexpertise, culture and as absolute.
Books in Progress by Elspeth Van Veeren
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The second part lies in understanding that, like visual politics, invisibilities operate in multiple modes that depend on different, and often competing, understandings of how knowledge and common sense are constituted. To fully grasp the breadth of what visual politics offers is to understand the different ways in which the visible is produced, ordered and normalised. But for this to work, it also means understanding how invisibility is similarly differently constituted. This means, for example, understanding the multiple ways invisibilities are conceived. This chapter therefore offers an initial typology of four modes of invisibility (though these categories are not exhaustive and frequently intersect): invisibility as barrier, inexpertise, culture and as absolute.
Using detention and interrogation practices from the war on terror as examples, this paper therefore explores the collision or mangle of practices in order to think through how things and their affordances (Gibson 1977) are part of the production of new security discourses. Guantánamo as a site and as a discourse evolved as a result of this mangle, as a result of the interaction of different security practices. ‘New war’ and ‘exceptional threat’ discourses collided with established prison and detention practices alongside the desire to project images of clean and humane warfare. So, to understand the extent of power and meaning-making potential of practices, I offer a study of these interconnections, tensions, resistances, and accommodations where the discourses of exceptionalism meet the practices of normalisation to (re)shape understandings of post 9/11 security.
To that end, this article sets out a new framework for understanding how materialities matter for security, a ‘critical materialities’ framework that interweaves both the symbolic as well as ‘active’ role that matter plays. The aim of this framework is to offer an explanation of how matter acts in security discourses. Not only to renew the call for matter's constitutive role as part of discourse, rather than in opposition to it, but also to argue for a consideration of the process of materialisation to complement the process of visualization that is part of producing and shaping meaning, in this case the production of (in)securities. Acting as more than symbol, matter actively shapes and compels certain meanings through materialization to help constitute a ‘common sense’ of security. Discourse involves more than linguistic articulations, ‘speech acts’, or symbols and representations. Matter, its bodies, objects and spaces, interacts with linguistic articulations to produce common sense understandings of security. In order to understand what it means to be secure, the world of matter and its co-constitutive role in meaning-making should be considered.
Through objects such as flags (a surprisingly neglected object of study in International Relations), and their visualities and materialities, we can trace the ways in which the US and its wars are, and continue to be, (re)imagined, bringing the state into being. This (re)imagining occurs not only through official speeches and policy-making or state practices of remembrance such as official memorials but through everyday objects and spaces and the myths, or narratives, that they bring to life. As this paper argues, (and responding to Jenny Edkins, and to Cynthia Weber, 2008, this journal) it is precisely the everyday quality and mobility of this object that allows it to stand in for missing bodies in a unique and powerful way, to challenge but also (re)produce the state. Crucially they not only mediate or represent these narratives but help transform them as both ideational and material, shifting discourses as they materialize them to produce and secure certain subject positions and commonsense of security with important political and ethical consequences. In looking at how the different levels of personal, national, transnational, and global politics works together through the object of the flag, we can see the operations of power that make security cultures make sense. The POW/MIA ‘myth’ which played such an instrumental role in transforming narratives of the Vietnam War with consequences for international politics and security has a new form, and 9/11 a new afterimage. Flying flags can be dangerous.
But this technology, and the discursive practices surrounding it, is scalar. In seeking to document these events and identify remains, state officials and their partner agencies create and use scales to make sense of the event: the scale of tragedies, atrocities and deaths that are counted; but also the technical scales that make visible the invisible nanograms and nanometers of remains. Deaths are scaled up as a problem whilst also scaled down as samples are gathered, categorized, barcoded, and transported. After being scaled down as part of technical procedures, samples are scaled up to produce a visible trace that can be measured, analysed and compared to a model population. Finally, these results are scaled yet again to confirm an individual identity, and therefore reassure, and secure, a family, a community and ultimately a world. Throughout these processes, highly technical procedures and expert knowledges are mobilized, compared and shared globally. How events that lead to mass fatalities are encountered, translated, visualised and communicated, especially strategically, in order to constitute and protect new rights and subjects offers an interesting exploration of the use, politics, material and visual cultures of scales. Studying the scaling of an inconceivable tragedy, even atrocity, and the discursive practices that revolve around the object of DNA can help us make sense of the interplay between science, technology, visualities and politics.
This panel sets out to explore the co-constitutive relationship between space and secrecy.