Knowledge of practice: A multi-sited event ethnography of border security fairs in Europe and North America

Abstract

This article takes the reader inside four border security fairs in Europe and North America to examine the knowledge practices of border security professionals. Building on the border security as practice research agenda, the analysis focuses on the production, circulation, and consumption of scarce forms of knowledge. To explore situated knowledge of border security practices, I develop an approach to multi-sited event ethnography to observe and interpret knowledge that may be hard to access at the security fairs. The analysis focuses on mechanisms for disseminating and distributing scarce forms of knowledge, technological materializations of situated knowledge, expressions of transversal knowledge of security problems, how masculinities structure knowledge in gendered ways, and how unease is expressed through imagined futures in order to anticipate emergent solutions to proposed security problems. The article concludes by reflecting on the contradictions at play at fairs and how to address such contradictions through alternative knowledges and practices.

Dislocated dialogue: An anthropological investigation of digitisation among professionals in fire safety

“…In this way, fieldwork was conducted through ‘polymorphous engagements’ (Gusterson, 1997) where I observed, interacted, and collaborated across a number of dispersed and heterogeneous sites and contexts with colleagues/informants working with digitisation (Green, 1999). Fieldwork was thus carried out by tracing four digitisation projects at DBI along with a handful of smaller adjacent projects in order to investigate various digitisation practices and explore diverse discretions and knowledge forms in different, situated contexts (Baird, 2017).…”

An inquiry into the digitisation of border and migration management: performativity, contestation and heterogeneous engineering

“…Also, technoscience is portrayed as exogenous to politics and society because innovators are seen as incapable of affecting the interests of social groups supporting or opposing their products. To limit analyses of digitisation by focusing exclusively on factors 'external' to technoscience, such as security-related concerns and policymaking processes, is a problematic reduction that hinders critical inquiries into, for instance, the notorious interests and marketing strategies of security industries that promote their products in the policy field (Baird 2017).…”

Secrecy and Methods in Security Research

“…Transaction monitoring systems are being produced by major technology firms that compete in the global market and are localised into many contexts. This dynamic context asks for a flexible approach that combines multiple ethnographic methods of data collection at multiple sites (Baird 2017;Cohn 2006;Marcus 1995;Schwell, this volume).…”