A Formula for Disaster: The Department of Homeland Security's Virtual Ontology

Abstract

This paper focuses on the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in order to theorise the spatialities of post-9/11 security knowledge and practice in the US. It analyses the organisational discourses that animate homeland security work, such as preparedness, vulnerability, the new threat environment, risk analysis and capabilities-based planning, and considers the implications of these practices for contemporary geographies of security. It is argued that DHS operates through a virtual ontology of threat, whereby potential, future threats are addressed as present possibilities that emerge in the spaces of everyday life. The sources of American freedoms and insecurities, the everyday, emerging circulations of goods and people, present DHS with a terrain of shifting threats from which both emergencies and preparedness may materialise. Disaster looming, the potential suspension of everyday life forms the basis for security practice as the emergency becomes a fact of life itself. The spatialities of this environment of imminent threat are considered and it is argued that the everyday emergency operates topologically as a continuous process of spatialisation.

Spatial Imaginaries Research in Geography: Synergies, Tensions, and New Directions

“…This section illustrates and advocates a performative view of spatial imaginaries. Performativity sees imaginaries not as ‘static linguistic representation…, but a medium through which social relations are both reproduced and changed’ (Martin and Simon , p. 284). Below, it will be stressed that considering the performativity of spatial imaginaries rejects a false binary between discourse and material practice, inconsistencies in conceptions of subjects' agency in developing and modifying spatial imaginaries, and enables new forms of spatial imaginary research.…”

“…This is also true of spatial imaginaries research. Viewing spatial imaginaries as performative opens up research opportunities for evaluating not only how the future is represented, but how material practices are performances of ‘the future’ in the present (Martin and Simon ). Performativity also enables consideration of how, for example, varying kinds of performances emerge in relation to spatial imaginaries about the future, and what kinds of spatial imaginaries – place, idealized space, or spatial transformation – best engender performances or are affected by them.…”

“…Predominately, geographers have explained spatial imaginaries as representational discourses about places and spaces (Bale 1996;Cornwell and Atia 2012;Davis 2011;Kothari 2006;Millington 2013;Radcliffe 1996;Said 2003). However, some geographers are now defining them as performative discourses (Bialasiewicz et al 2007;Gregory 2004;Martin and Simon 2008;Pilkey 2013;Puar 2006;Talburt and Matus 2014). In other words, spatial imaginaries are stories and ways of talking about places and spaces that transcend language as embodied performances by people in the material world.…”

Bombs, bodies, and biopolitics: securitizing the subject at the airport security checkpoint

“…As Dillon and Adey have argued, the subject of security is both that which must be secured and the source of threat. Likewise, it is the 'uniquely American freedoms' that enable threat to be immanent to the 'population and the way of life' (Martin and Simon 2008). It is this infinite recursion-in addition to the presumption of reflexivity and adaption-that allows the US federal government to continually expand the purview of 'homeland security.'…”

“…For critical security studies scholars, the collection of biometric data, the tracking of transaction data, and newly linked state intelligence and crime databases mark a change in the spatiality of immigration and border enforcement, producing a border that is 'everywhere and nowhere' and imbricated with everyday life (Amoore 2006;Amoore and de Goede 2008;Coleman 2007;Martin and Simon 2008). Airports are particularly salient sites in this regard, because they operate both as ports of entry to the USA and as rather mundane workplaces for business travelers and airport employees (Parks 2007).…”