SPIN Colloquium 2024

12^th-13th December 2024

 

 

How secrecy (re)makes the world

 

Secrecy, or at least the perception of secrecy, has transformed the world in ways that have been radically underappreciated, minimised, overlooked and even consciously erased. This colloquium invites contributions from scholars interested in understanding and tracing the multiplicity of ways in which secrecy, and associated ways of ‘unknowing’, have shaped the world around us, from everyday to planetary scales. Secrecies, as we contend, are far more pervasive both historically and today than currently understood, operating, for instance, beyond the view of secrecy as ‘tool’ of statecraft, instead shaping identities, social relations, economies, and security landscapes, for example.

 

As part of this colloquium, we therefore welcome papers and attendees interested in exploring and discussing the following themes:

 

1. Secrecy and governance – How is secrecy (or secrecies) governed and regulated historically and today? How have secrecies emerged through governance? And, what form have and do ‘secrecy rights’ take? What form should they take?

 

2. The generative power of secrecy/secrecies – Rather than understanding secrecy as producing a negation or as a neutral ‘tool’, how is secrecy/secrecies productive of or produced by practices, identities, relations, economies, intellectual projects, new knowledges, conspiracies, crises, or social and political dis/orders? How are everyday secrecies related to historical and global transformations? Currently and over time?

 

3. Secrecy, structures and inequalities– Whilst a common way of understanding secrecy remains a view of secrecy as an intentional act of concealment by an individualised actor, how can secrecy/secrecies be understood as a social, structural, contingent, and unintentional practice? How are structures of power and secrecies intertwined? How do knowledge and information become generated, flow and/or are erased in more uneven ways, especially in relation to unequal distributions of power? How do knowledge inequalities, real and imagined, shape societies and politics?

 

4. Secrecy and resistance– How does secrecy operate ‘from below’ as well as by more powerful actors, historically and in emergent forms, or in relation to new technologies?

 

5. Theories of secrecy– What are the possible relationships between secrecy/secret? What is made possible/impossible through the binaries and boundary work such as secrecy/revelation, hidden/exposed, true/false, real/fake, known/unknown, as well as in relation to openness, transparency, confession or to ignorance? What are the relations between secrecy and knowledge (un)making? How are secrecies imagined? What is the allure and the contingency of secrecy itself?

 

6. Secrecy as method– What are the methodological challenges associated with studying secrets, secrecy and/or secrecies? Where and how can we study, or have we studied, secrecy as a practice, culture, affect, logic? How can we be curious with and about secrecy and secrecies?

 

This colloquium therefore welcomes scholars from across disciplines –including but not limited to Anthropology, Criminology, Cultural Studies, Education, History, International Relations, Philosophy, Politics, Sociology and the multi-disciplinary areas of Surveillance Studies, Intelligence Studies, Secrecy Studies, and Agnotology — to share their thoughts and research on how secrecy made the modern world. Together, we will hear different disciplinary perspectives on key concepts, ideas and challenges of working ‘against the grain’ in relation to secrecy, ignorance, knowledge, and information and the way in which secrecy has (re)made the world.

 

The event will be held in Bristol the 12^th-13th December, with drinks and dinner on the evening of the 12th. A full programme, including details of the venue, will be made available to participants closer to the event.

 

The general format for each session will be panels of papers with facilitated discussion, including questions and involvement of the wider colloquium. Participants are encouraged therefore to submit more than one paper in the hope that the conversation will flow, overlap and develop over the course of the sessions. And whilst the colloquium will be developed for in-person attendance, a remote option will be made available. As such the event will be well catered with time for networking and socialising, on and offline. Early career researchers and postgraduate researchers are warmly welcome to attend and offer papers and presentations.

 

Following the colloquium, participants will be invited to submit their contributions to planned outputs including a special issue of the journal Global Politics or Secrecy and Society, and/or an accompanying edited volume to be prepared for publication. As such, we will be soliciting papers in the standard essay form as well as encyclopaedia entries for the growing A-Z of Secrecy and Ignorance project.

 

 

Please submit paper abstracts of 300 words no later than 27th of September via: https://forms.gle/yoEtfjWLV2J4STXx7

 

 

Pending the results of current funding applications to help reduce costs, colloquium registration fees will not exceed: £10 – £60 (online); £20 – £120 (in-person) based on a sliding scale (PGR, ECR, Professor). A number of travel bursaries are available for PGRs/ECRs. Please contact us if fees are a concern. We also welcome contributions to a hardship fund to support the participation of colleagues who may find research and travel funding in the current climate of UKHE difficult.

 

 

We look forward to welcoming you in Bristol in December!