Engagement all the way down

Abstract

This paper asks about the practices and forms of critique afforded at the intersection between Science-and-Technology Studies and the critical study of security politics, by drawing on the work of Isabelle Stengers. Can engagements with practice generate effective forms of critique? How does the attention to materialities and the fine-grained analysis of technical practices, that typically accompany STS-inspired research, feed into ways of practicing critique? How can the analytical attention to 'little security nothings' be translated into critical agendas? In addressing these questions, Belgian philosopher Isabelle Stengers serves as an inspiration, not just for her philosophical writing on the situated nature of critical thinking, but also for her own experimental politics and engagement. A key message of the paper is that critical practice is "engagement all the way down." The article thinks through the ways in which the work of Stengers and her companions can be put into practice in qualitative critical security research. It builds on Foucault's rejection of the separation between theoretical, universalist knowledge on the one hand, and practical knowledge on the other. It emphasises the processual, uncertain and practical aspects of critical thinking. It identifies the notions of following, leveraging, joined risks and paying attention as key, concrete pathways of engaged critique.

Experimental Regulations and Regulatory ­Sandboxes – Law Without Order?

“…In 1932, Justice Brandeis coined the metaphor 'states-as-laboratories', suggesting that the use of experiments for self-governance purposes could also be combined with the advancement of new policies 'without risk to the rest of the country' (New State Ice Co. v. Liebmann). More recently, experiments with laws and policies have been more directly associated with the promotion of technological innovation (Cortez, 2013, Crootof & Ard, 2021Ranchordás, 2015), the development of novel competition law and market regulation enforcement techniques (Svetiev, 2020), the construction of alternative scenarios that help institutions design anticipatory policy for uncertain futures (Campbell-Verduyn & Huetten, 2022;de Goede, 2020), and advance evidence-based lawmaking (Van Gestel & de Poorter, 2016). The modern development of experimental laws, policies and other experimental legal regimes such as regulatory sandboxes occurred against the backdrop of growing scholarship on the principle of effectiveness (Mousmouti, 2012), evidence-based lawmaking (Van Gestel & de Poorter, 2016), temporary legislation (Gersen, 2007), and regulation and innovation, particularly in the financial sector (Allen, 2019) Experimental legal regimes, a broad term employed in this article to refer to all forms of experiments with laws and regulations, normally take the form of a temporary derogation from general rules (Heldeweg, 2017).…”

When the future meets the past: Can safety and cyber security coexist in modern critical infrastructures?

“…Our approach responds to the calls by de Goede (2020) for increased engagements between empirical research on expert practices and critique. By treating the implementation of cyber security regulations as ‘situated practices’, we bring our attention to the notion of expertise construction and de-centre policy discourses or legal analysis.…”

“…As a result, long after data collection period finished, the first author of the paper is still collaborating with practitioners; publishing government guidance or giving regular industry talks. The downside of research approaches relying on in-depth engagement with practitioners is the possibility of losing ‘critical distance’ and getting ‘co-opted’ by practitioners’ agenda (de Goede, 2020). This is especially challenging when working with practitioners whose goals are both normative and open to interpretation, like security and safety.…”

“…typical career routes and education required), or the juxtaposition of safety culture of OT engineers and innovation culture of IT workers (Guldenmund, 2000; Reece and Stahl, 2015; Thekkilakattil and Dodig-Crnkovic, 2015). Infrastructure providers running on OT systems are also organised very differently compared to IT companies – critical infrastructures are often hierarchical and governed through public-private partnerships, while IT companies range from start-ups to monopolies and they are most often private sector entities (Dunn-Cavelty and Suter, 2009; Murray et al, 2017). These distinctions are important as they inform who gets to conceptualise risk, how do they do it and why.…”

Politicians, pathogens, and other threats to aid workers: a material semiotic analysis of violence against health care in the Syrian conflict

“…Haraway (1992) describes her theories as 'subject-shifters', optical instruments used to replace dominant -often anthropo-or phallocentric -analytical perspectives with more democratic and socially responsible modes of engagement with the world. In CSS, her work has played an important role in problematising questions regarding context and positionality (see Hudson 2018;Marieke De 2020). A central question that these authors have raised is the following: From where do we speak when we speak about security?…”