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1 |
ID:
165014
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Summary/Abstract |
The securitization of health concerns within the European Union has hitherto received scant attention compared to other sectors. Drawing on the conceptual toolbox of actor-network theory, this article examines how a ‘health security assemblage’ rooted in EU governance has emerged, expanded, and stabilized. At the heart of this assemblage lies a particular knowledge regime, known as epidemic intelligence (EI): a vigilance-oriented approach of early detection and containment drawing on web-scanning tools and other informal sources. Despite its differences compared to entrenched traditions in public health, EI has, in only a decade’s time, gained central importance at the EU level. EI is simultaneously constituted by, and performative of, a particular understanding of health security problems. By ‘following the actor’, this article seeks to account for how EI has made the hunt for potential health threats so central that detection and containment, rather than prevention, have become the preferred policy options. This article draws out some of the implications of this shift.
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2 |
ID:
099270
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Publication |
2010.
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Summary/Abstract |
This paper analyses the deployment of wind power and the related local controversies using actor-network theory (ANT). ANT provides conceptual instruments for a fine-tuned analysis of the contingencies that condition a project's success or failure by focusing on the micro-decisions that intertwine the material aspects of the technology, the site where it is implemented, the participation process, and the social relations in which they are embedded. By considering controversies as alternative efforts of competing networks of actors to 'frame' the reality and enroll others, ANT sheds light on the complex and political nature of planning a wind farm project, insofar as it consist in aligning material and human behaviours into a predictable scenario. 'Overflows' occur when actors do not conform to expectations, adopt conflicting positions and develop their own interpretations of the project, thus obliging designers to adapt their frames and change their plans. To demonstrate this framework, we apply it to the case of a wind farm project in the South of France, near Albi. Our analysis suggests a new approach to examining wind power projects in terms of the interaction between globally circulating technologies, unique characteristics of the site, the participation process and the social dynamics that emerge when these are combined.
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3 |
ID:
123587
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Publication |
2013.
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Summary/Abstract |
Congo's state failure is usually analysed in terms of a 'broken social contract', reflecting the degree to which mainstream understandings of state failure are conditioned by classical social contract theory. This article takes a different route to understanding Congo's predicament by building on insights from actor-network theory (ANT). ANT's insistence on society as a socio-material entanglement, it shows, translates into increasing attention to the role of material infrastructures in constituting governmental power. Conversely, this approach also allows the highlighting of the importance of the absence of the material underpinnings of rule in drawing up more nuanced accounts of state failure.
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4 |
ID:
091654
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Publication |
London, Sage, 2009.
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Description |
xii, 484 p. : ill.Harbound
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Contents |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
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Standard Number |
9781412934008
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Copies: C:1/I:0,R:0,Q:0
Circulation
Accession# | Call# | Current Location | Status | Policy | Location |
054501 | 303.322/CLE 054501 | Main | On Shelf | General | |
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5 |
ID:
127802
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Publication |
2014.
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Summary/Abstract |
Critical approaches to security have come to define themselves against mainstream security studies by not a priori assuming what security is, but rather taking it as an 'essentially contested concept'. Yet, as evidenced by the way in which recent 'turns' in the field have played out in the debate around airport security, ontological assumptions about security tend to restrict the scope of empirical analysis, with airport security being studied as, for instance, either discourse or practice. This article aims to propose an alternative methodological approach to security by studying security as controversy. Studying security as controversy means refraining from making a priori assumptions about the ontology of (in)security, instead considering it as itself at stake in - and hence the outcome of - security governance efforts. The article elaborates on this approach by drawing on core insights from actor-network theory, a conceptual and methodological toolkit that allows, as I show, a focus on how security actors perform security by enrolling, assembling and translating heterogeneous elements into stable assemblages that can be presented as definitive security solutions or threats. The article illustrates this approach through a look at the case of airport security at Amsterdam Airport in the aftermath of the 2009 Christmas terrorist attempt.
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6 |
ID:
123580
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Publication |
2013.
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Summary/Abstract |
This article examines the problem of how to translate actor-network theory into the field of international relations, and develops three arguments. Firstly, the article draws on Emily Apter's notion of the 'translation zone' both to rethink the concept of translation in actor-network theory and to highlight the relation between translation and politics. Secondly, the article interrogates the relation between actor-network theory and empirical research, emphasising the ways in which empirical case studies can have theoretically generative implications. Indeed, actor-network theory should not be understood as a body of theory that can be simply applied to a range of empirical examples. Finally, the article examines a number of problems that international relations poses for actor-network theory. I argue that actor-network theory needs to be adjusted and reconfigured in response to the challenge of international relations.
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7 |
ID:
123585
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Publication |
2013.
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Summary/Abstract |
In the 'human' world we believed that we could transform necessity into freedom through our own creativity and agency, understanding the laws of the external world and mastering them through the development of culture, science and technology. In the 'post-human' world, we are told by new materialists, actor-network theorists and post-humanists that creativity and agency still exist, but that they are not the property of humans alone; rather, they are a product of the assemblages, associations and relationships through which we are attached to the world. Rather than attempting to understand and act in the world on the basis of our separation from it - articulated in the constraining, alienating and resentment-filled modernist divides of human/nature, subject/object, culture/environment - we should develop our understandings of 'attachment' to the world. This article critically examines these claims and suggests that, on the contrary, we become less 'attached' and that the external word becomes increasingly alien and mysterious to us. In doing so, it mounts a defence of subject/object understandings and social constructions of freedom and necessity.
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