Chair: Dr Amanda Chisholm

Speaker: Sarah Perret

 

Abstract

Faced with the conundrum of reconciling the Brexit and the Friday agreement, Theresa May suggested in February 2019 that ‘technology could play a part (...) to work for the particular circumstances of Northern Ireland.’ The ‘myth of infallibility’ with which technologies are endowed continues to feed the beliefs of politicians when it comes to border security (Piazza 2008). Indeed, over the past 15 years, the European Commission has poured millions of Euros into Research & Development of diverse devices to enhance border security. Yet, this funding of security devices embodies and integrates specific knowledge that underpins relations of power at stake.

In this talk, Sarah Perret interrogates the conditions of the production of knowledge and non-knowledge in EU R&D on Border Security. To this end, she analyses the projects on Border Security funded under the FP7 Programme that aim to control licit or illicit humans’ flows. She uses a method of data visualisation introduced by Pierre Bourdieu in the ’70s called Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA), which allows to locate which actors bring their knowledge to which devices.

Drawing on critical work from STS, Critical security Studies and Ignorance Studies, she looks at identifying what kind of knowledge is ignored or produced as ‘non-knowledge’ at the EU borderzones. These projects largely ignore knowledge from critical minded actors, such as members of NGOs, SHS scholars, or migrants. Their absence to most of the projects dealing with illicit human flows produces a form of non-knowledge that shapes the subjectivities of what border security is and is not.

 

Bio

Dr. Sarah Perret is Research Associate at the Department of War Studies working on the ERC Project led by Pr. Claudia Aradau: ‘SECURITY FLOWS: Enacting border security in the digital age: Political lives of data forms, flows and frictions.’ She studies the transformation of knowledge through practices of digital (in)security at ‘borders,’ and the effects of ‘datafication’ on EU border security practices.

Before joining King’s College London, she conducted a postdoctoral research at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris focused on the re-conceptualizing ‘risk’ and the sharing knowledge on societal security. She taught in several French Universities and at Georgetown University as well. She has also been a visiting researcher at Georgetown University's BMW Centre for German and European Studies during her doctoral studies.

She received her PhD in Political science and International relations from the University of Paris-Saclay, in which she compared the security implementation ("securitization") of legislative changes on naturalization in France, Germany, and the United States. The dissertation explored the structures of domination in the construction of the meaning of ‘threat,’ especially regarding questions of democratic legitimation (rule of Law, symbolical power of the Parliament, juridical language).

In parallel of her academic curriculum, she has been parliamentary advisor at the French ‘Assemblée nationale’ and consultant at the World Bank on Government and public policies in West Africa. She also has been ministerial advisor on equality and social diversity at the Ministry of National Education, Higher Education and Research.

 

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