Intimate Capture: Security, Desire, and the Coloniality of Computation
Book under contract with Duke University Press
Grove, N. “Weapons of mass participation: Social media, violence entrepreneurs, and the politics of crowdfunding for war.” European journal of international relations 25, no. 1 (2019): 86-107. Published online first, December 2017.
Grove, N. “The Cartographic Ambiguities of HarassMap: Crowdmapping Security and Sexual Violence in Egypt.” Security Dialogue, Special issue on Questioning security devices: Performativity, resistance, politics. Vol. 46, No. 4, 2015: 345-364.
Intimate Capture: Security, Desire, and the Coloniality of Computation (under contract with Duke University Press) looks at how control is expressed and constituted in visual, sensorial and infrastructural fields of experience produced through novel forms of data-driven security practices. It centers questions of coloniality and intimacy as preceding these interventions in ways that reproduce historical relations of racialized vulnerability and the determination of who or what is a threat. The scene setting for this inquiry is the amorphous shift from what was previously called the ‘War on Terror,’ to the multi-scalar matrices of population targeting and new forms of data capture and analytics that produce the ‘Middle East’ as something technological, aesthetic and libidinal rather than geographic, discrete, or cultural, and where the conditions of technological emergence are bent toward the dream of total environmental management through total environmental awareness. Intimate Capture takes a planetary view of these global mutations in security and surveillance practices produced in and through connective computational cartographies beyond the putative boundaries of the region, and toward questions concerning the emergence of new architectures of scientific expertise, global racisms, and new modes of perception and experience (re)produced through the creation of data that is simultaneously made a form of currency, a capacity for advocacy, and an indispensable resource for enduring regimes of control, exploitation, and dispossession.
A Political Ecology of catastrophe Agents and architectures in the era of the prototype
Current research Project
Invited Special Issue (Review of International Studies): Disruption by design: Planetary programming in the aftermath of geopolitics, forthcoming 2022.
My second major research project considers the kinds of futures being envisioned for us by catastrophe agents, who through a deluge of proposals, consultancies, services, and technologies advance a version of prototyping as a form of governance where ‘crisis’ is framed as something virtuous, a moral good, or a state of being to embrace rather than lament or prepare for. As part of this research, I have been developing a census map of forms of disruptive innovation, future-proofing, and apocalypse adaptation, exploring the new terms of art on offer, and how and why particular projects and locations become beta-tests for technology companies and government institutions focused on global catastrophe intervention in a post-apocalyptic state of embrace. Beyond any singular business and marketing strategy or technology, this menagerie of state agencies, architectural and design firms, and tech companies reflect collective atmospheres of preemptive de-stability, which position all forms of matter and contingency as having a specific kind of value tied to chaos. I am interested in how prototyping as a mode of governance emerges around these future imaginaries of apocalypse, prompting us to reflect on the consequences of investing in a world premised on an ethos of erasure.