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Technologies of the quotidian: British empire, race, and the biopolitics of security
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Haziz-Ginsberg, A.. Technologies of the quotidian: British empire, race, and the biopolitics of security. Retrieved from https://doi.org/doi:10.7282/t3-47nh-5v46

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TitleTechnologies of the quotidian: British empire, race, and the biopolitics of security
NameHaziz-Ginsberg, A. (author); Puar, Jasbir (chair); Mikdashi, Maya (member); Decena, Carlos (member); Rao, Rahul (member); Rutgers University; School of Graduate Studies
Date Created2022
Other Date2022-01 (degree)
SubjectWomen's studies, Empire, Race, Security, Surveillance, Great Britain -- History, Northern Ireland -- History
Extent215 pages : illustrations
DescriptionThis dissertation considers how banal encounters with state security simultaneously produce the legitimacy of the state and the coherence of race in mainland Britain and Northern Ireland. Reading the colonial and metropolitan alongside one another, the dissertation follows two lines of inquiry. First, I consider how ordinary engagements with the state enabled by infrastructures of surveillance such as the emergency telephone are key sites where common sense logics of race and nation are forged. Second, I trace how the figure of the terrorist not only consolidates hegemonic understandings of security but is itself a malleable technology that enables the expansion and relegitimation of counterterrorism as a form of policing and as a site of governance. I utilize interdisciplinary methods—including archival research, participant observation, and discourse analysis—to engage contemporary political questions through jointly historical and theoretical frameworks. Throughout the dissertation, I describe how state power in myriad forms is legitimized through techniques often understood to be benevolent. Beginning in chapter one with the development of 999, the first emergency telephone service, I consider how this becomes a site where quotidian understandings of emergency are produced and normative paradigms of security are simultaneously cohered. This earlier technology, I argue, provides both the material and affective ground for more expansive forms of citizen-surveillance and state security, such as counterterrorist reporting initiatives deployed both in colonial and metropolitan contexts. In chapter two, I examine the deployment of emergency calling towards colonial ends in Northern Ireland via the Confidential Telephone. Chapter three examines the figure of the Irish terrorist via a settler colonial lens and parses the transit between this figure and the paradigmatic discourses and figurations of terrorism and counterterror that shape the contemporary. The last chapter examines the discourses around far right violence in the contemporary UK, tracking the reconfigurations of counterterrorism in relation to the figure of the far right terrorist. I argue that the expansion of targets has allowed counterterrorism to be reorganized as a more efficacious state practice. Throughout, I focus on the relationship between seemingly banal practices which have often escaped critical scrutiny, and more exceptional forms of emergency such as counterterrorism, a highly visible security project which is more widely understood to be racializing in its effects. Mapping histories that have previously not been read together, I argue that it is in the most banal encounters with the state that security is legitimized and the common sense logics of the nation and race are forged.
NotePh.D.
NoteIncludes bibliographical references
Genretheses
Persistent URLhttps://doi.org/doi:10.7282/t3-47nh-5v46
LanguageEnglish
CollectionSchool of Graduate Studies Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Organization NameRutgers, The State University of New Jersey
RightsThe author owns the copyright to this work.
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