Audializing migrant bodies: Sound and security at the border

Abstract

Sound represents a salient yet rarely examined counterpoint to visuality and materiality in security, international bordering, and mobility literature. Using the context of sub-Saharan African migration as grounding for empirical analysis and drawing on fieldwork conducted in Morocco in 2015 and 2016, this article lays the foundation for a research agenda that understands voice, and the sonic body more broadly, as mechanisms of political power. In examining the central roles that sound, hearing, and voice play in strategies of individual resistance at border crossings, as well as in state, private, and transnational communication and surveillance regimes, it attends to the ways in which sound and the audialized body reconfigure power relations, and structure mobility and personal identity. This analysis contributes to the growing literature addressing biometric borders and the deterritorialization of security practices, and argues that sound, along with more familiar nodes of securitization, constitutes a critical site of governmentality and therefore of ethical and moral negotiation.

Up in the air: Ritualized atmospheres and the global Black Lives Matter movement

“…The IR emotions literature has developed a range of useful perspectives for thinking about collective emotions, from intergroup emotion theory (Sasley, 2011), to circulations of affect (Ross, 2014;Solomon, 2014), structures of feeling (Koschut, 2017;Van Rythoven, 2021), the institutionalization of emotions (Crawford, 2014), affective communities (Hutchison, 2016), and neuroscience (Gammon, 2020;Holmes, 2018), to name a few. Other recent work has begun to explore what might be called the "atmospheric" aspects of emotional experience, such as the "sensing" of threats at border controls (Gregory, 2019), "situational awareness" of danger during urban terrorism (Krasmann and Hentschel, 2019), the role of sound in security politics (Weitzel, 2018), and circulations of rumors in conflict zones (McGahern, 2016). Such work often shares claims with recent research on micropolitical approaches to global politics (Holmes and Wheeler, 2020;Kertzer, 2017;Solomon and Steele, 2017), which similarly calls into question the traditional analytical hierarchy of different scales of IR research.…”

Covid-19 contact-tracing apps and the public/private co-production of security

“…Moreover, De Goede (2012) makes the case that locating privacy on the liberty side of liberty/security is based on the false presumption that more data necessarily gives more security and overlooks the fact that sacrificing privacy is itself a security risk. Hence, the specific meaning that is ascribed to privacy, and how exactly privacy as a right or liberty is understood to relate to security, matters for how privacy operates discursively to counter or legitimize security policy and practice (see also Bauman et al, 2014; Jacobsen, 2015: 157–158; Leese, 2014: 507; Schouten, 2014; Valkenburg and Van der Ploeg, 2015; Weitzel, 2018: 434).…”