• Emerging Securities Unit
lecture   ESU Autumn Seminar Series to begin Posted on 06 October 2011 The Autumn Work in Progress Seminar Series will begin at 12:00 on the 11th October in CM1.24.

The Emerging Securities Research Unit (ESU) was created in 2009 to widen the smaller, but very research-active Biopolitics of Security Unit.

The ESU is an interdisciplinary group involving researchers and doctoral students from Politics and International Relations, Human Geography, Criminology and International History. Its general remit is to foster research on the ways in which different ‘ways of life’ (in state, social, economic, and cultural forms) have been promoted and protected, as referents of security. To this end, the Unit develops projects that draw on contemporary and historical cases to understand the specificities of security strategies, and to theorise security in the making.

Security, as the ESU’s general referent for analysis, is widely understood in its strategic, economic, social, cultural, environmental, and political dimensions. Special emphasis is put in understanding how security discourses and practices are made possible, in some cases in the form of security technologies, and how they articulate regimes of government and truth. In doing so, the Unit does not privilege divisions between security studies, political economy, or theories of the political, the economical, the social, or the cultural. It assumes instead a problem-driven approach.

Members of the ESU are actively involved in challenging traditional understandings of security and power. Employing diverse methodologies such as archival research, participant observation, genealogical and archaeological enquiry, as well as semi-structured interviewing, projects involve a plethora of traditions of thought, from continental philosophy, to economic history. The events and activities organised and sponsored by the Unit reflect this diversity.

The Emerging Securities Unit is hosted by the School of Politics, International Relations and Philosophy (SPIRE) at Keele University and is home to the Biopolitics of Security Network.

 

Thematic Priorities

  • The security of mobilities and circulation
  • The protection of spaces, borders and infrastructures
  • Resilience and the values of security and war

We welcome doctoral students and visiting researchers on any areas related to the projects and interests of the Unit.

For enquiries, contact Dr Luis Lobo-Guerrero