Overview
- Engages with important debates proliferating across Geography, International Relations and Sociology by exploring in new ways the transformations security practices undergo in a context where a drive towards governing emergencies through risk intersects with the realisation of new capabilities for data and digital technologies.
- Offers fresh insight into the data-based facilitation of governance by risk outside of the spectacular, global domain, concentrating instead on its incarnation as an experience that is lived on a daily basis in local organisations attendant to everyday emergencies.
- Affords a rigorous account of the intricate processes by which digital infrastructures including hardware, software, data export cables, algorithms, human beings and their thought processes, assemble to negotiate and imagine renditions of contingent futures whilst deconstructing the myriad techniques and governmental logics through which imagined futures are acted upon in the here and now.
- Develops a critical understanding of the technologies and techniques developed by security organisations by drawing on and expanding upon broader conceptual debates across the social sciences, including those related the force of the elemental, affective conditions emanating from material space, the enrolment of aesthetic knowledge as a political tool and re-application of technologies from one domain to another.
- By introducing these empirical and conceptual trajectories, sheds new light on pressing questions which emerge where security meets risk rationales an digital technologies, such as: how is subjectivity reformulated through digital technologies which now play a crucial role in governance? Through what parameters are future emergencies perceived and thought of as plausible realities to come? What forms of knowledge become enrolled in governing apparatuses and whose interests are they underpinned by? And how is risk lived as a spatially bound and temporally inflected reality that reverberates across ordinary people governing extraordinary events?
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About this book
The 21st century has born witness to myriad changes in the way the world is secured from the many emergencies that continually threaten to disrupt it. This book concentrates on two such changes. First, it takes stock of the ever-increasing development and diversification of data and digital technologies that security organisations have at their disposal. Secondly, it examines how these digital devices have fostered a new direction in which security agencies primarily conceive of emergencies as so many risks of the future. Emergency governance has undergone what might be called an anticipatory turn here, with digitally rendered and imagined scenes of future contingency becoming cause and justification for intervention in the here and now. Rather than scrutinising this turn at its most spectacular heights in the domains, for instance, of warfare or counter-terrorism, the book explores the facilitation of risk governance through digital technologies in a more quotidian incarnation; namely by tracing the steps that the United Kingdom’s Fire and Rescue Service (FRS) take to govern fire emergencies whose potential has been identified but have yet to unfold. Delving into the FRS, the book maps out a digital infrastructure that includes various software, institutional processes, multiple forms of risk calculation but also human beings, relations and consciousness and an array of material spaces in which these things exist. Accentuated here is how these components assemble to produce projections of future emergencies on a number of sensorial registers. This infrastructure is shown, in turn, to inform and shape a catalogue of refined modes of action through which interventions on future emergencies are made in the present. Engaging in depth with this infrastructure, the FRS provides an understanding of risk as a lived relation, risk as an organisational ethos whose liveliness is founded upon and reverberates through the relations existing between those people and things operating in the FRS to make sense of potential fire emergencies. Using the concept of lived relation as a foundation, the book develops a critical understanding of anticipatory governance by grasping its resonance with issues emanating in the wider field of security, showing how security figures as a set of practices that rely upon and cultivates affective conditions, that enrols the force of elements like fire into its institutional arrangement, that draw on an array of knowledges to exercise power and, in the process, that instantiate new forms of subjectivity.
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Keywords
- risk and security
- Fire and Rescue Service
- Materiality
- Digital Infrastructure
- future studies
- STS
- knowledge
- security and emergency governance
- United Kingdom Fire and Rescue Service (FRS)
- anticipatory governance
- risk as 'lived relation’
- geo-politics
- digital technologies
- Big Data
- Regulatory Reform Order (2005)
- The Politics of Data
- British Politics
Table of contents (7 chapters)
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Governing Future Emergencies
Book Subtitle: Lived Relations to Risk in the UK Fire and Rescue Service
Authors: Nathaniel O'Grady
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71991-7
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Social Sciences, Social Sciences (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-319-71990-0Published: 23 July 2018
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-10142-8Published: 15 January 2019
eBook ISBN: 978-3-319-71991-7Published: 06 July 2018
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XIII, 149
Number of Illustrations: 3 illustrations in colour
Topics: Science and Technology Studies, Sociology of Culture, Knowledge - Discourse, Sociology of Work, British Politics