Seminar description
Big ideas and ideologies are given concrete meaning by concrete actors, practices, material arrangements - and infrastructures. In this research, I explore the entanglement of materiality in the processes of (re-)building political identity in international relations. I argue that infrastructures - and prominently, infrastructures of security - are memorials of its kind, since they reflect political visions and systems of meaning from past times, which are built into the technology and inscribed into its different layers and sediments. Specifically, I look at the infrastructures of biosecurity and the changing role of biocontainment laboratories, where highly sensitive research on deadly pathogens is conducted. How is the politics of biosecurity co-produced by material infrastructures? These issues are explored in a case study about the transformation of a Czech biodefence centre, which reflects the unease with which material leftovers from past security projects are integrated in and interact with new sociotechnical visions of a secure society.
About the speaker
Dagmar Rychnovská is a lecturer at the University of Sussex, Department of International Relations, and currently a visiting researcher at the Graduate Institute in Geneva. Her research examines the entanglements of science, technology, and (international) security, with a particular focus on biosecurity and global health governance.