Description:
An ethnographic investigation into the dynamics between space and security in countries around the world
It is difficult to imagine two contexts as different as a soccer stadium and a panic room. Yet, they both demonstrate dynamics of the interplay between security and space. This book focuses on the infrastructures of security, considering locations as varied as public entertainment venues to border walls to blast-proof bedrooms. Around the world, experts, organizations, and governments are managing societies in the name of security, while scholars and commentators are writing about surveillance, state violence, and new technologies. Yet in spite of the growing emphasis on security, few truly consider the spatial dimensions of security, and particularly how the relationship between space and security varies across cultures. This volume explores spaces of security not only by attending to how security is produced by and in spaces, but also by emphasizing the ways in which it is constructed in the contemporary landscape. The book explores diverse contexts ranging from biometrics in India to counterterrorism in East Africa to border security in Argentina. The ethnographic studies demonstrate the power of a spatial lens to highlight aspects of security that otherwise remain hidden, while also adding clarity to an elusive and dangerous way of managing the world.Brief description:
Setha Low is Distinguished Professor of Environmental Psychology, Geography, Anthropology, and Women's Studies, and Director of the Public Space Research Group at The Graduate Center, City University of New York.
She has been awarded a Getty Fellowship, a NEH fellowship, a Fulbright Senior Fellowship, a Future of Places Fellowship and a Guggenheim for her ethnographic research on public space in Latin America and the United States. Her most recent books are Spatializing Culture: The Ethnography of Space and Place, Anthropology and the City, Spaces of Security (with M. Maguire), and Why Public Space Matters.
Review Quotes: "Spaces of Security is a richly detailed volume examining the multiple dimensions, practices, and formulations of security that increasingly shape the conditions for modern life, as well as the discourses that have shaped how security is understood.... Spaces of Security ethnography, by demonstrating the dimensional detail frequently elided in the body of existing research. And it does so convincingly, with a sustained attention to the interacting complexities recognizable in different subjectivities, temporalities, practices, and scales the notion of securityscapes proposes. The utility in such a shift is an important one, and gestures toward scholarship to come."--Society & Space