Security Technologies and Criticality

Abstract

This chapter examines how researchers can juggle being critical whilst engaging with security technologies and their users. Critical security studies scholars have widely engaged with the effects produced by security and have highlighted how some security practices produce or aggravate social injustice, engender violence, or discriminate against individuals or entire groups. If the practical challenge for critical research is to negotiate a space between the extreme poles of proximity and distance, a challenge for the author became very tangible during a collaborative research project on predictive policing in Germany and Switzerland. With regard to policing, critical intimacy means to acknowledge the need for the maintenance of social order without blindly approving of just any police practice. There is a fine line between productive engagement with security technologies and an inadvertent reproduction of the professional norms around their deployments.