During its first year of activities, HUD has focused on developing a shared conceptual lexicon across its core team. This has involved expanding upon, deepending, and revising its preliminary conceptual framework, and combining that work with preliminary empirical inquiry into its core spaces of inquiry. During this time, HUD’s team has been dissemenating the findings of this work at key international events, seminars, and conferences. Details of these are provided below.
At the annual Central and East European International Studies Association (CEEISA) and International Studies Association (ISA) joint conference in Rijeka, Croatia, Anna Leander presented an early draft of a paper co-authored with Jonathan Luke Austin on ‘speculative fabrication.’ Anna also participated in several roundtables and on other panels on core themes linked to HUD.
Abstract:
Speculative Fabrication: Affirmative tinkerings with humanitarian security
Jonathan Luke Austin and Anna Leander
To understand security technology, we must begin speculating about its design and making. We claim that the social sciences must integrate methodologies of making, designing, and fabricating into its everyday praxis to both understand technoscientific friction and intervene in those processes. In this paper, we seek to further conceptualize this claim. To do so, we begin by adapting Haraway’s understanding of speculative fabulation, alongside work in speculative design, to develop the concept of ‘speculative fabrication.’ Our goal in joining the terms speculation and fabrication is to explore the possibility of entangling the playful and improvisational affordances of speculative inquiry with the materialist commitment implied by acts of fabrication. In this, we seek to move beyond the sometimes too dematerialized visions of speculation that can “denounce the world in the name of an ideal world,” to speak with Isabelle Stengers, and embrace instead an ethos of ‘affirmatively tinkering’ with technoscientific praxis. In order to make these claims, we draw on examples from a project focused on a series of speculative fabrications designed to augment humanitarian security practice in different ways. We dwell specifically on how such speculative fabrication requires 1) a commitment to the risk of proposing ‘operative constructs’ (Stengers) that exceed notions of speculation-as-critique or speculation-as-play, without neglecting the virtues of reflexivity, and which engage in techno-security praxis affirmatively, and 2) a commitment to generating the form through the cultivation of collaborative frictions that mix transvocational and transdisciplinary insights in ways that can productively alienate us from the safe terrain of the known.
At the 2024 iteration of the European Workshops in International Studies (EWIS) event in Istanbul, Turkey, HUD Principal Investigators Jonathan Luke Austin and Anna Leander convened a workshop on ‘Improvising the Future.’ The workshop brought together a group of around fifteen leading international voices on theorizing the connections between political practice and emerging futures. The workshop was used, in particular, to align with HUD’s overal research goal of developing future-orientated humanitarian design interventions.
Workshop Abstract:
Improvising the Future
International Relation’s meditations on the future are caught in a binary focus between embracing hope or hopelessness utopia or dystopia, apocalypse or redemption. But this status quo is a repetition. André Gorz once described such moments as periods in which “the meaning of history [is] suspended.” Without either a past, present, or future to adore, we turn to the imaginary. Thus, ‘futurism’ becomes a suffix, speculation a prefix, and critical pragmatic engagement with the status quo a lost goal. Again, such a politics is a politics of suspension. The future becomes a vanishing point, to be imagined but not reached. But can we think things differently? How do we bring the future into the present?
In this workshop, we are interested in how practices whether academic or quotidian, ideational or material, embodied or disembodied, aesthetic or technical practices of improvisation, tinkering, design, sabotage, bricolage, wondering or wandering , collage, fabrication, and experimentation can escape this suspension of history. To improvise a future is to think about how we can engage pragmatically in the here and now in ways that embrace ontologies of becomi ng and emergence but also seek to critically prod, nudge, adjust, influence, or gently recompose their trajectories. This necessarily involves an acceptance of the impurity of political processes, the friction of all sociality, and a willingness to collaborate across contact zones. But at its core is, again with Gorz, the idea that we must “discern the unrealized opportunities which lie dormant in the recesses of the present” in ways that open up a fuzzy future beyond utopia or dystopia.
At the 2024 EASST-4S conference in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, two papers by HUD’s Jonathan Luke Austin and Anna Leander were presented. Specifically, a paper titled Emergency frictions in humanitarian design, co-authored between Austin, Leander, and Tania Messell, and a second paper titled Speculative Fabrication: Affirmative tinkerings with humanitarian security by Austin and Leander. During her time in Amsterdam, Leander also participated in numerous other HUD-linked activities.
Abstract:
Emergency Frictions in Humanitarian Design
Jonathan Luke Austin, Anna Leander, and Tania Messell
Emergencies are frictional. In moments of perceived crisis, calls to enact radically distinct epistemic frames are common. Such a trend has accelerated with the rise of anthropocene politics, climate change, and other perceived existential threats. The spectre of such phenomena introduces a temptation to transform technoscientific practice and throw-away the known. But the allure of emergency epistemics is dangerous. At moments of crisis, exceptional measures meet the quotidian and banal. In turn, scalar frictions between local realities and global imaginaries arise that render any emergency epistemics impotent. Actionable knowledgeable becomes a demand, but rarely a reality. To problematize the allure of emergency epistemics, this article historicizes humanitarian design responses. It does so through the example of one tipping point in those responses: the Bhola cyclone in East Pakistan. This disaster was one event whose enaction of emergency practices and epistemics revealed the inadequacy of their allure in the face of local frictions, opening instead a pathway to improvising humanitarian design responses grounded in systems-thinking, resilience, etc. We use this example to disaggregate how techno-scientific practices are recalibrated in creolized encounters with unexpected but also entirely unexceptional frictions that emergency situations do not create but simply crystalize. In doing so, we are especially concerned with reading technoscientific engagements with emergency through a postcolonial frame that critiques the dichotomy between humanitarian response through the frame of either exceptional emergency or technocratic management. Instead, we conceptualize humanitarian design as requiring the development of frictional speculative practices that stay with the world’s trouble.
Abstract:
Speculative Fabrication: Affirmative tinkerings with humanitarian security
Jonathan Luke Austin and Anna Leander
To understand security technology, we must begin speculating about its design and making. We claim that the social sciences must integrate methodologies of making, designing, and fabricating into its everyday praxis to both understand technoscientific friction and intervene in those processes. In this paper, we seek to further conceptualize this claim. To do so, we begin by adapting Haraway’s understanding of speculative fabulation, alongside work in speculative design, to develop the concept of ‘speculative fabrication.’ Our goal in joining the terms speculation and fabrication is to explore the possibility of entangling the playful and improvisational affordances of speculative inquiry with the materialist commitment implied by acts of fabrication. In this, we seek to move beyond the sometimes too dematerialized visions of speculation that can “denounce the world in the name of an ideal world,” to speak with Isabelle Stengers, and embrace instead an ethos of ‘affirmatively tinkering’ with technoscientific praxis. In order to make these claims, we draw on examples from a project focused on a series of speculative fabrications designed to augment humanitarian security practice in different ways. We dwell specifically on how such speculative fabrication requires 1) a commitment to the risk of proposing ‘operative constructs’ (Stengers) that exceed notions of speculation-as-critique or speculation-as-play, without neglecting the virtues of reflexivity, and which engage in techno-security praxis affirmatively, and 2) a commitment to generating the form through the cultivation of collaborative frictions that mix transvocational and transdisciplinary insights in ways that can productively alienate us from the safe terrain of the known.
On 27 and 28 June 2024, HUD’s Jonathan Luke Austin and Maevia Griffiths attended the two-day symposium Synthetic Vision/Images of Power at the Framer/Framed platform for contemporary art, visual culture, and critical theory & practice in Amsterdam. The event hosted talks and discussions that explore the transformations induced by Artificial Intelligence (AI) within the interplay of power, knowledge and images. Specifically, it focused on the unprecedented possibilities of AI in generating ‘synthetic vision’ (the ability to “see” algorithmically) and ‘synthetic image generation’ (the ability to create new images through prompts). Full details of the event can be found here. At the event, Jonathan Luke Austin and Maevia Griffiths presented work from a longer-term collaboration on the possibility of deploying ‘sousveillance’ technologies for violence prevention in different contexts. While expressed in this context in terms of its conceptual and theoretical coordinates, this work draws on earlier work by Austin on sousveillance technologies applied to preventing torture in detention and on wider humanitarian crises. An abstract of the talk is below.
Abstract:
Synthetic Vision for Subversion: Thinking Beyond the Algorithmic
Jonathan Luke Austin and Maevia Griffiths
What’s the future of synthetic vision? Can it be imagined beyond the algorithmic? As a subversive mode of worlding reality? To explore that question, this presentation meditates on three cases of synthetic vision that offer starkly contrasting visions of its normative potentials. First, we introduce a research project being developed with the support of Chinese security agencies. The project involves developing machine vision techniques to detect abuse in detention and policing settings by authorities. It works to reduce human beings – police or detention authorities – to pixelized skeletal forms interpreted by an algorithm, erasing any specificity to their personhood or the ecologies they inhabit. Purportedly, to improve compliance with legal norms. In a second move, we compare this project to Wassily Kandinsky’s series of line drawings Dance Curves in which he reduced the form of a dancer he observed to a series of skeletal lines remarkably similar to that of the algorithmic vision of Chinese security agencies. In the Bauhaus tradition, he sought to minimize – reduce – the form of dance and the body to abstraction, erasing personhood. In a third move, we explore one filmic representation of the process of becoming a torturer, entitled Grievable/Ungrievable. Grievable/Ungrievable is an abstract representation that meshes the movements of a dancer’s body with her descent into the materiality of an underground facility. Without voice, or narrative, a process of becoming violent emerges. An experimental engagement with film and dance as a mode of revealing the embodied essence of violence. We discuss this project as a form of ‘artistic’ synthetic vision in which the moving images produced seek to represent a form of image-truth and image-evidence but without the restraints of algorithmic or technical mediation. Overall, these three acts of minimizing human form and subjectivity are put into deliberately provocative tension to help think synthetic vision in the full scope of its normative ambiguity to meditate on alternative political trajectories. Specifically, we draw on these examples to problematize the dominant intuition that what Latour termed ‘irreductionism’ (avoiding such minimization of human form and subjectivity) is always normatively preferable to the reductionist nature of the kind of technical mediation epitomized by synthetic vision technology. Instead, we speculate on the possibility of designing a subversive synthetic vision.
At the upcoming Pan-European Conference on International Relations hosted by the European International Studies Association in Lille, France, HUD’s Jonathan Luke Austin and Maevia Griffiths will participate in a series of events linked to HUD. Austin has organized two roundtables, one on the theme of ‘Research Anarchism’ exploring the political economy of contemporary social science and the need for radical transdisciplinary and transvocational change, and another on ‘Futures for New Materialism’ exploring how Science and Technology Studies (STS) based theoretical principles require urgent reconfiguration to meet contemporary conceptual, political, and practical changes in the world. He also participates on a roundtable on Governing Digital Gaia that explores the entanglements between digital technologies and governance in the planetary crisis of the anthropocene.
Griffiths will present the preliminary work on her PhD dissertation and the connections between humanitarianism, hope, and the visual – through developing the concept of ‘presencing’ as a practical and conceptual mode of making ‘real’ humanitarian dilemmas. She will also present a paper co-authored with Austin entitled Sur-real Violence: Re-Enacting and Un-Enacting Political Violence, which explores HUD’s focus on exploring alternative design interventions against violence.
Abstract:
Sur-real Violence: Re-Enacting and Un-Enacting Political Violence
Jonathan Luke Austin and Maevia Griffiths
Acts of political violence are often seen as ruptures, breaches, or singularities. We focus on ‘the event’ of violence, in spite of its globally patterned and repetitive nature. At the same time, political violence is re-enacted for a multitude of reasons: in military, militia, or security training exercises, in courts of law, and in the media. Such re-enactments are situated on a spectrum between fact and fiction, depending on their intended purpose, and allow those events, breaches, or ruptures to echo across political space. But most re-enactments of political violence – fictional or factual – remain logocentric in their appeal to either narrative, logic, or human subjectivity. In this paper, we explore alternative modes of re-enacting political violence that seek to make present what is absent in the reification of violence as an event. Namely, re-enactments that seek to both visibilize and subvert the recursive nature of political violence itself: foregrounding what Arendt termed the automatism of social processes through abstract media. Specifically, we unpack 1) filmic re-enactments of violence that eschew narrative, voice, and logocentric meaning, instead experimenting with the sensual and affective through dance, silence, or material landscapes, and 2) digital attempts to ‘capture’ political violence algorithmically through its abstraction/reduction to mundane corporeal gestures, material-technological dynamics, and sonic reverberations. In each case, we conceptualize these alternative modes of re-enactment as surreal in the etymological meaning of the term: ‘above’ reality, as it is typically perceived. In doing so, we also experiment with unpacking a different political future for undoing or, rather, ‘un-enacting’ political violence.
