"At Homes with the Security State" a public lecture by Cindi Zatz, 13th March, London

you are warmly invited to come to a public lecture entitled 'At Home
with the Security State'
given by Cindi Katz, Professor of Geography, City University of New York

Thursday 13 March 5.30pm

Lecture Room 126
Department of Geography
Queen May, University of London
Mile End Road
London E1 4NS

A wine reception will follow the lecture

please confirm your attendence with Jason Go, Research and Teaching
Officer, Department of Geography, QMUL
Tel. +44 (0)20 7882 8129
Email. j.go@qmul.ac.uk

ABSTRACT for the talk:
A mobius strip of fear threads between home and ‘homeland,’ weaving
anxiety to military technology, it twists around security. In security’s
name, people have acquiesced to a public environment that is monitored,
bunkered, and conspicuously patrolled while they remake their
homes as fortresses. The stepped up militarisation of everyday life—to
say nothing of the sprawling and seemingly endless ‘war on terror’ – is
routinised in the apparatus of fear. Children, as vulnerable subjects
and as emblems of a fraught future, both embody the insecurity and
provide an alibi for its technologies. In this presentation, I will
argue that the regime of parental hypervigilance has much in common with
that of the homeland security state. The parallels in tactics,
strategies, and effects between the two scales of ‘domestic’ security
are as chilling as they are revealing. Looking at their effects on the
body and the spaces of the home, the city, and the public environment
more broadly, I will argue first that the material social practices of
security at these two scales feed off of and help justify one another to
reconfigure daily life and legitimate practices unthinkable even a
decade ago, and second that as these strategies are increasingly
domesticated they soften us as subjects of surveillance