Abstract

This talk introduces the Special Issue (SI) on ‘Border agnotologies: Power, technology, resistance’, which is forthcoming in Geopolitics. We outline the contributions that the special issue makes to the vibrant interdisciplinary conversation between critical scholarship on borders, migration and security, and the field of ignorance studies. By focusing on ‘border agnotologies’, we have invited authors to explore the specificities of bordering practices in the production and reproduction of knowing and not-knowledge. Through the plural ‘agnotologies’, we propose to pluralise the vocabularies of ignorance and non-knowledge by unpacking the practices that produce not-knowing. The SI attends to the heterogeneous forms that not-knowing takes in bordering practices, unpacks processes of knowledge and non-knowledge production, and traces how non-knowledge is entangled with power relations and how it enacts subjectivities. As bordering practices multiply forms of exclusion at the same time as producing ‘differential inclusion’, we need to understand how these multiplications and hierarchies are sustained through non-knowledge and not just knowledge, and how analyses of non-knowledge can reconfigure modes of critique, enable political interventions and forms of resistance. To address these dimensions of analysis, we will draw on our work as well as the contributions to the SI.

Claudia Aradau is Professor of International Politics in the Department of War Studies and Principal Investigator of the Consolidator Grant SECURITY FLOWS (‘Enacting border security in the digital age: Political worlds of data forms, flows and frictions’), funded by the European Research Council (2019-2024).
Her research has developed a critical political analysis of security practices. As more and more problems and people become constituted as objects and subjects of security, her research has inquired into the effects this has for political subjectivity and democracy. Her current research focuses on how digital technologies reconfigure security and surveillance practices, and how algorithms and machine learning recast relations between security, democracy and critique.
She received the 2023 Distinguished Scholar Award by the International Political Sociology Section of the International Studies Association. Her latest book, Algorithmic Reason: The New Government of Self and Other (with Tobias Blanke) won the 2023 Best Book Award by the Science, Technology and Arts in International Relations (STAIR) section of the International Studies Association.
Prof. Aradau spent a decade as associate editor and editor of Security Dialogue (until 2018). She is a member of the editorial collective of Radical Philosophy and member of the editorial boards of Security Dialogue, International Political Sociology and Politics.

Dr Lucrezia Canzutti is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the Department of War Studies. Prior to starting her fellowship, she was a Research Associate on the ERC-funded project ‘Security Flows’ (led by Prof. Claudia Aradau) and a Lecturer in the Politics of Immigration at Newcastle University.
Dr. Canzutti’s research is situated at the intersection of international relations, critical security studies and critical migration studies. Her work has been published in high-impact journals such as Political Geography, International Political Sociology, Environment and Planning C, Global Studies Quarterly, and the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies.
Dr. Canzutti’s research draws on a range of qualitative methods, including ethnography, archival research, oral histories, and creative practice. She is committed to collaborative and engaged research and has regularly worked with practitioners, artists and NGOs.

Registration required: https://forms.office.com/e/MALkxinYW7?origin=lprLink

Wednesday February 12, 2025 from 1:00 pm to 3:00 pm
REPI - Université libre de Bruxelles
IEE 39 avenue Franklin Roosevelt (Spaak room)
1050 Bruxelles

BIM Seminar Series
Coordinators: Julien Jeandesboz, Julia Van Dessel