HCRI celebrates its 10 year anniversary with a rich programme of events. Join us for our research seminar series featuring current and alumni colleagues, and current and alumni postgraduate research students.
Speaker 1: Dr Sophie Roborgh
Seminar title: Medical Muhajireen - Health workers under Daesh
In a time of fierce public debate on the return of British nationals who joined IS (muhajireen), one group has largely escaped attention: medics who joined IS. Can one argue to have been a humanitarian, as some have maintained, whilst serving in IS’ highly politicised healthcare system and under an administration that flaunted its human rights abuses? Studying these medical muhajireen offers a provocative window into questions of mobilisation, identity, politics, and medical humanitarianism.
Speaker 2: Dr Nat O'Grady
Seminar title: Emergency Infrastructures, Automation and Public/Private Security Hybrids
Transformations to urban infrastructure facilitated through devices and processes associated with so-called ‘Big Data’ raise new lines of inquiry for how we might conceptualise and critique the enrolment of data-based technologies within security practices. The paper engages with and extends these debates by reflecting upon the ongoing processes underpinning the development of New York’s burgeoning ‘free’ wifi infrastructure, called LinkNYC, and its deployment as an emergency warning device for the public. I outline specifically the agreements brokered between an assemblage of public and private organisations to legally enshrine the implementation of this infrastructure whilst also providing insight into the technical processes through which emergency warning is itself brought into effect. The case of LinkNYC, I argue, offers fresh trajectories for understanding the redistribution of authority and responsibility where new infrastructure associated with Big Data intersect with security. Owing to the wide array of organisations coordinating its enactment, I suggest that this infrastructure serves additional, somewhat surreptitious, ends and interests when warning the public of potential emergencies. Additionally, I contest that an imaginary of expertise has developed around the technical processes that facilitate emergency warning that plays a crucial role in re-shaping the power relations inscribed within this new security infrastructure. Lastly, I consider how the proliferation of these infrastructures, along with the governing arrangements that condition them, instantiate new forms of what, after Bonnie Honig, we might called ‘discretionary’ decision making that operates beyond legal parameters.
For more information about the Institute, our anniversary, events, and more, visit: https://www.hcri.manchester.ac.uk/about/10-years-hcri/
