Exchange Seminar on Violence of Security Practices in Threat Management

The seminar “The unfolding of hunting-power-knowledge: the violence of security practices in threat management” will be held on October 12, at 2:00 p.m., in room 2.09 of CPII of the University of Minho (Campus of Gualtar), with Ignacio Mendiola, from the University of the Basque Country.

Security has become one of the great political axes of contemporary societies. In order to achieve security, the threat is identified and the measures to be taken are established. Security is a discourse, but it is also performative, it alters reality, the spaces upon which it is projected and the subjectivities that are affected by it, producing vigilant subjects and supervised subjects and subjects at risk.

The purpose of this seminar is to think of a form of power that will stop the threats by analyzing the metaphor of hunting. Hunting will then appear as a metaphorical reservoir that serves to name the concrete exercise of a power of knowledge concerned with hunting for those people who embody the threat and who today refer, in large part, to those suspected of being terrorists and to migrants. All this will introduce a reflection of political geography linked to the production of (exposure to) death.

Professor of sociology at the Universidad del País Vasco, Ignacio Mendiola focuses his research on how power relations affect the production of subjects and spaces, giving special importance to the reflection on biopolitics and necropolitics. Ignacio Mendiola published the books: Praise of the Lie. Around a sociology of falsity (Lengua de Rag, 2006), The biotechnological garden. Technoscience, Transgenics and Biopolitics (The Cataract Books, 2006) and Inhabit the Uninhabitable. The political practice of torture (Bellaterra, 2014), among other works.

This seminar is organized by the Exchange project.

[Text published 03-10-2018]