“Situational Awareness”: Sensing Security in the City
Final Report Abstract
As contemporary dangers appear to be increasingly unforeseeable and dispersed, “situational awareness” has grown in importance for security. Relevant fields are as diverse as emergency responses to pandemics or to urban terrorism. Instead of following the rationale of predicting, preventing or pre-empting future harm, situational awareness demands a concerted smartness and sensitivity in the here and now: an ability to read situations so as to react promptly and avert the next unfortunate event. Within a broader perspective, the concept’s emergence can be read as a response to the faltering promise of security in liberal democracies. It was, however, only the recent experience of terrorist attacks in European cities that has fostered its prevalence. As a tactic of facing threats in urban settings, where situational awareness appears as the “civilized” version of an established military practice, it can also be seen as a concretization of the recent trend towards resilience. The project’s main focus was on how situational awareness is operationalized in the field of urban security: how does the rise of situational awareness form conceptualizations and practices of security? In two case studies pursued in the doctoral projects of the research associates – on rightwing terror attacks in Germany and the implementation of new frameworks of police training – the project examined public and governmental reactions as well as different modes of dealing with a catastrophic experience; and it investigated how situational awareness trained as a systematic skill and tactic shapes forms of policing and ultimately the emergence of security dispositifs. Furthermore, the project extended the thematic and conceptual scope towards insecurities on a planetary scale. Conceiving the Anthropocene as a situation allows for analyzing how new forms of togetherness are being created; and the notion of collapse awareness brings to the fore today’s different attempts to deal with coming and ongoing catastrophes. The project can be seen as a major contribution to the analysis of governing security and managing risks in the 21st century.
Publications
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Democratising Security in Turbulent Times: An Infrastructural Lens. Sicherheit & Frieden, 38(4), 191-194.
Hentschel, Christine & Schröder, Ursula
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Im Raum des Virus. X-Texte zu Kultur und Gesellschaft, 263-276. transcript Verlag.
Hentschel, Christine
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»Das große Erwachen«: Affekt und Narrativ in der Bewegung gegen die Corona-Maßnahmen. Leviathan, 49(1), 62-85.
Hentschel, Christine
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Die Situation der Zerstörung. Gewalt im Anthropozän. Mittelweg 36 31(6), 25-42
Krasmann, Susanne
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Edgework in post/apokalyptischen Zeiten. Soziopolis: Gesellschaft beobachten, Nr. Dossier Apokalyptik der Gegenwart
Hentschel, Christine
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Naming the city: on the governing forces of narratives in the formation of security dispositifs. Critical Studies on Security, 12(1), 33-47.
von der Burg, León & Krasmann, Susanne
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Police performances of vulnerability: scenario training for life-threatening situations. Behemoth – a journal on civilisation (Special Issue: Polizeiliche Performanzen von Gewalt) 16(1), 57-69
Burg, León von der & Johannes Ebenau
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Training der Zukunft? Virtual Reality Trainings bei deutschen Polizeibehörden. Bürgerrechte & Polizei/CILIP 131, 76-87
Burg, León von der, Johannes Ebenau & Jasper Janssen
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Training Beyond Boundaries? Virtual Reality Scenario Training as Worldmaking for Complex, Life-Threatening Situations. Key Challenges in Geography, 181-198. Springer International Publishing.
von der Burg, León; Janssen, Jasper & Ebenau, Johannes
