Guest Lecture: Carrie Benjamin

Everyday (counter)terrorism: normalising threat, risk, and hostile vehicle mitigation in Birmingham

Carrie Benjamin, urban anthropologist, is currently Marie Skłodowska-Curie / EUTOPIA-SIF post doctoral fellow at CY Cergy Paris Université, invited by laboratory PLACES.

Since 2017, English cities have seen a proliferation of material infrastructure aimed at protecting crowds, buildings, and transportation networks from potential terrorist attacks. While these visible manifestations of geopolitical crisis and domestic insecurity—including bollards, barriers, CCTV, and counterterrorism police patrols—often appear near the sites of attacks, they’ve proliferated in many cities that do not have a recent experience with terrorism. In the context of this heightened sense of threat, counterterrorism has become both an omnipresent and unremarkable part of the urban landscape, which is altering the felt experience of public space in cities. Drawing on ethnographic research in Birmingham and interviews with local and national security officials, police, private vendors, and residents, I demonstrate how various actors have sought to normalise this militarisation of urban public space, and how the banalisation of threat has been met with a reluctant acceptance and civil inattention by city centre visitors.

Date: 16th May 203 from 12:30 to 14:00

The hybrid guest elcture is organised in person at the Auditorium of MIR in Neuville-sur-Oise and remotely on Zoom.

To attend the remote guest lecture, please connect to Zoom: https://cyu-fr.zoom.us/j/95401249406

Meeting ID:954 0124 9406

The video will be online on the CY AS YouTube channel