Digital geographies of grassroots securitisation

Digital surveillance and securitisation technologies are becoming an increasingly ubiquitous part of everyday lives. Constellations of hand-held devices, smartphone applications and partnerships between police, the security industry and civil society shift responsibility for preventing and recording risk and crimes onto citizens. This development suggests substantial changes to the relationship between state and citizens and is likely to have profound effects on socio-spatial relationships and experiences in place. Until this point, geographers have demonstrated little engagement with these developments. This provocation focuses on particular strengths of theoretical and empirical research traditions in social and cultural geography to suggest ways in which the discipline might constructively engage with the digitisation of citizens’ securitisation practices. It foregrounds four areas in which empirical work on digitally inflected surveillance and securitisation practices will enable a rethinking of key geographical concepts in ways that will further the conceptualisation of digital technology and security. The provocation calls on social and cultural geographers to be mindful of the potential of grassroots securitisation to empower disfranchised communities while considering that these technologies and cognate policies might facilitate the further hollowing out of the state under ongoing processes of neoliberalisation.     

Book reviews

Tham Seong Chee. Social science research in Malaysia, vii, 151pp. Singapore: Graham Brash, 1981.

Anthony Whitten. The gibbons of Siberut. xiii, 207pp., 8 plates. London, etc: J. M. Dent and Sons Ltd., 1982. £9.50.

Katrien Polman. The north Moluccas: an annotated bibliography, xx, 192pp. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981. (Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal‐, Land‐ en Volkenkunde. Bibliographical . Series, 11.) Guilders 30.

J. H. M. C. Boelaars. Head‐hunters about themselves: an ethnographic report from Irian Jaya₃ Indonesia, xv, 296pp., 15 plates, 5 maps. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981. (Verhandelingen van het Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal‐, Land‐ en Volkenkunde, 92.) Guilders 90.     

A magnetometer survey with electronic positioning control and calculator-plotter system

Historical Archaeology - This paper describes the instruments, methodology, and results of a marine magnetometer survey of twenty-five miles of the South Texas coast conducted by the Underwater...