Insecurity and precarity have developed into normalized states in our living worlds. On the individual level we experience unstable labor conditions and the increasingly dispersed nature of social networks, while in geopolitical terms, terrorism and immigration have brought the rhetoric of securitization to fever pitch. Anxieties to secure ourselves imprint our lives in an omnipresent manner, ranging from interpersonal to international scale. The rise of these extraordinary measures of securitization is in this form and extent unprecedented in human history.

Yet we are just starting to understand how and on what levels the omnipresence of surveillance and securitization changes how we live. This stream aims not only to investigate cultures of security in reaction to anxieties both on micro and macro scales, but also to ask: why do we secure the way we do, and does it actually provide security in the way we envision it? The focus of this stream is on this topic of how we actually want to secure the pluralistic, interconnected, and often precarious world we live in. Stream events will discuss alternative models of security as much as practices like whistleblowing that challenge the information and power asymmetries we are exposed to. It asks for new ethics of security that are formulated in the light of digital culture and fully take into account the multifaceted nature of our society.