A UCL SSEES Research Student Seminar with David Rypel, PhD Candidate at SSEES
This presentation is a part of David’s PhD research, which investigates ways in which the question of belonging is enacted in security practices of queer Georgians.
How do efforts to make our lives secure employ and affect the sense of where we and others belong? Among critically-minded scholars, security is often thought to be inherently exclusionary: It needs (and so constitutes) “dangerous Others” who must be dealt with while reinforcing the boundary around the notion of “Us”. They thus see the concept with distrust, and some go as far as dismissing it altogether as they suspect it is an instrument of illiberal and undemocratic governance. Others contend, however, that this is not the case; they identify, on the contrary, an undivided common identity or freedom from oppression as the source of security. In this view, exclusion undermines security even if it might not seem to be so in the short term.