Secrecy, publicity, and the bomb: Nuclear publics and objects of the Nevada Test Site, 1951–1992

Anaïs, Seantel; Walby, Kevin

doi:10.1080/09502386.2015.1113553

Cited by 30 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 33 publications

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“…Building on some of the fundamental insights generated by early sociological (Simmel, 1906) and social-psychological (Goffman, 1959) analyses of concealment, security researchers are moving beyond the study of this or that secret, and beginning to focus on secrecy, understood as the social processes of keeping and revealing secrets (Costas and Grey, 2016: 7). In the past few years we have seen an exciting wave of security research exploring secrecy (De Goede and Wesseling, 2017; Kearns, 2017; Neocleous, 2003; Paglen, 2010; Anaïs and Walby, 2015; Grondin and Shah, 2016), or ‘adjacent concepts’ (Costas and Grey, 2016: 2) like in/visibility (Van Veeren, 2017), ignorance (Rappert, 2012), conspiracy and non-knowledge (Aradau, 2017) and also the methodological challenges of researching ‘closed’ worlds (De Goede et al, 2020). I call this work ‘new secrecy research’ to distinguish it from the more conventional focus on revealing and exposing security secrets, or assessing the strategic merits of secrecy.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Everyday secrecy: Oral history and the social life of a top-secret weapons research establishment during the Cold War

Walters

2019

Security Dialogue

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Despite the welcome turn within security studies towards a more material- and practice-oriented understanding of state secrecy, the ways in which security actors experience, practise and negotiate secrecy in their everyday work lives has been rather overlooked. To counter this neglect the article calls for attention to everyday secrecy. Focusing on a former top-secret weapons research facility in the UK called Orford Ness, it uses oral history to give an account of ex-employees’ memories, experiences and practices concerning secrecy. Such a focus reveals that subjects make sense of procedures and rules of secrecy in ways that are sometimes surprising and unexpected. Ultimately this perspective emphasizes that secrecy is not just what governments and organizations prescribe and proscribe; it is also shaped by subjects who negotiate these rules. Everyday secrecy matters: as a perspective it shows that secrecy is not simply imposed by states and organizations from ‘above’; it is also made from ‘below’, albeit very asymmetrically.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Everyday secrecy: Oral history and the social life of a top-secret weapons research establishment during the Cold War

Walters

2019

Security Dialogue

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“…Secondly, paying attention to materials, to intangible artifacts, though only ever partial, and showing where they resist or refused, shows us how secret operations are not just acts of occluding/hiding information, of segregating knowledge, but are intensely spatial and material. These are insights already artfully demonstrated in the literature on secrecy practices that bear examination in the light of cybersecurity knowledge practices (Anaïs & Walby, 2016;Birchall, 2014;Paglen, 2010). This approach casts a critical eye on the way that the traces are produced by technics and spokespersons.…”

Section: Conclusion: Assembling Cybersecuritymentioning

confidence: 89%

Assembling cybersecurity: The politics and materiality of technical malware reports and the case of Stuxnet

Stevens¹

2019

Contemporary Security Policy

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This is an article about how cybersecurity gets "made," with a focus on the role of commercial computer security firms in generating knowledge in matters of international cybersecurity. The argument is two-fold. Firstly, malware may be an intangible artefact in some ways, but its success and its interpretation as malware is deeply interwoven in social, technical, and material alliances. Secondly, a materialist-minded examination of Symantec's Stuxnet reports will demonstrate the politically situated nature of how cybersecurity expertise emerges. The article finds that Symantec's work was not a-political or neutrally-technical: Their experts made profoundly political choices in their analyses. By showing the processes that go into making cybersecurity, the article contributes to a widening and deepening of debates about what is at stake in cybersecurity knowledge and practices.

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“…The photographs provided documentary evidence of the abandoned buildings and landscapes and, before departing, Walby was inspired by Edward Burtynsky's landscape photographs of stunning and tainted places. Examining decommissioned industrial sites and abandoned mining towns through the lenses of social and environmental justice, the research explores the methodological implications of visual methods (also see Balayannis, 2019Balayannis, , 2020Anaïs and Walby, 2016). To this end, Walby contends there is something about place that eludes visual methods, especially photography, which is consistent with a counter-visual analysis: examining what is communicated through the invisible, as opposed to focusing on (readily) apparent narratives, cues, and significations.…”

Section: B R I N G I N G V I S U a L A R T S A N D S O C I A L S C I ...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Tailings and tracings: using art and social science to explore the limits of visual methods at mining and industrial ruins

Walby

Davis

2022

Visual Communication

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This article examines a novel approach to visual methods that artist Ben Davis has developed based on sociologist Kevin Walby’s research into decommissioned industrial sites, which is referred to here as tracing. Disrupting the over-reliance on photographic representation in visual methods in the social sciences, the authors integrate audio recordings of interviews, as well as photos, maps, and building plans for pop-up mining communities into visual art works to provide a counter-visual analysis of the landscapes depicted in Kevin Walby’s photographs of Uranium City. After reviewing literature on environmental degradation and on visual methods, the article elaborates on Ben Davis’s practice of tracing as a technique representing the feeling of decomposition and decay generated by the harms of industrial resource extraction. The authors argue that the technique of tracing excavates layered histories of place, providing a way of creating new interpretations of social and environmental issues. They then discuss how this counter-visual analysis and approach to tracing enables a trans-disciplinary and dialogical space for engagement with academics, artists, and activists to explore issues centered on land, contamination, and justice.

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Secrecy, publicity, and the bomb: Nuclear publics and objects of the Nevada Test Site, 1951–1992

Cited by 30 publications

References 33 publications

Everyday secrecy: Oral history and the social life of a top-secret weapons research establishment during the Cold War

Everyday secrecy: Oral history and the social life of a top-secret weapons research establishment during the Cold War

Assembling cybersecurity: The politics and materiality of technical malware reports and the case of Stuxnet

Tailings and tracings: using art and social science to explore the limits of visual methods at mining and industrial ruins

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