Systemic concepts of resilience have proliferated across governance contexts, especially critical infrastructure planning and policy. These concepts promise to enhance the perpetuation of nations, governments, organizations, communities and citizens, and undergirding infrastructures, against existential threats. While the prevalence of systematic resilience thinking spans numerous policy appropriations, the scaling of resilience is remarkably consistent: resilient systems are said to encompass a hierarchy of enveloping levels and authorities -persistence and stability at larger scales accompanied by significant and fast perturbations at smaller scales. Drawing on empirical engagement with the UK's critical infrastructure policies and practices, this paper problematizes this hierarchical scalar axiom. Such treatments of scale are shown to contribute to a specific scalar politics, wherein the imperative for, and reification of, infrastructure resilience, is bound up with the (re)scaling of neoliberal governmentalities, rendering some subjects and objects as visible, thinkable and actionable to resilience while obscuring and eliding others. In the light of this problematization we propose an alternative, flatter scaling of infrastructure resilience, drawing inspiration from the flat ontologies of Bruno Latour, decentralized future infrastructure scenarios and the accounts of infrastructure practitioners themselves.
This paper examines the wider social impacts of hosting the London 2012 Olympic Games and its 'legacy' ambitions in East London, emphasizing securitization as an inbuilt feature of the urban regeneration project. Drawing on extensive original empirical research, the paper analyses the modalities of Olympic safety and security practices within the Olympic Park itself and their wider impact, while also connecting this research to theorization and debates in urban sociology and criminology. In this complex setting, a raft of formal and informal, often subtle, regulatory mechanisms have emerged, especially as visions of social ordering focused on 'cleansing' and 'purifying' have 'leaked out' from the hyper-securitized 'sterilized' environment of the Olympic Park and become embedded within the Olympic neighbourhood. In such complex circumstances, applying Douglas' (1966) work on purity and danger to the spatial realm provides a key conceptual framework to understand the form and impact of such processes. The imposition of order can be seen to not only perform 'cleansing' functions, but also articulate multiple symbolic, expressive and instrumental roles.
Automated facial recognition (AFR) has emerged as one of the most controversial policing innovations of recent years. Drawing on empirical data collected during the United Kingdom’s two major police trials of AFR deployments—and building on insights from the sociology of policing, surveillance studies and science and technology studies—this article advances several arguments. Tracing a lineage from early sociologies of policing that accented the importance of police discretion and suspicion formation, the analysis illuminates how technological capability is conditioned by police discretion, but police discretion itself is also contingent on affordances brought by the operational and technical environment. These, in turn, frame and ‘legitimate’ subjects of a reinvented and digitally mediated ‘bureaucratic suspicion’.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.