We’re pleased to share that the draft programme for the SPIN Colloquium 2024, December 12th and 13th, Bristol (hybrid) is now available.
For more information on the event, please see the draft programme.
Non-presenting attendees are very welcome to attend and should register to attend through the University of Bristol Online Shop.
Event Overview
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 therefore 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. They operate, for instance, beyond the narrow or ‘thin’ view of secrecy as ‘tool’ of statecraft. Instead, secrecies shape identities, social relations, cultures, economies, political institutions, and security landscapes.
As part of this colloquium, we therefore welcome papers and attendees interested in exploring and discussing the following themes:
- Secrecy and governance– How is secrecy (or secrecies) governed and regulated historically and today? How have secrecies emerged through governance? And, what forms do ‘secrecy rights’ take? What forms have they taken? What forms should they take?
- 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?
- Secrecy, structures, inequalities, resistance – 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 are knowledge and information generated? How do they flow and/or are erased in more uneven ways, especially in relation to unequal distributions of power along racial, gender, sexual, class and disability lines? How do knowledge inequalities, real and imagined, shape societies and politics? How does secrecy operate ‘from below’ as well as by more powerful actors, historically and in emergent forms, or in relation to new technologies?
- Theories of secrecy– What are the possible relationships between secrecy and 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? How has secrecy itself evolved and changed over time and in different cultural and political contexts?
- 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 trans-disciplinary areas of Surveillance Studies, Intelligence Studies, Secrecy Studies, and Agnotology — to share their thoughts and research on how secrecy (re)makes the 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 (re)makes the world.