SPIN is delighted to welcome three speakers to our first SPIN Panel Session of 2026. This will also be the first opportunity to hear more details on chapters planned for our forthcoming SPIN Secrecy Studies volume.
On 11th February, 3-430pm (UK time) we will be joined by SPIN-sters:
Dr Ana Flamind (University of Groningen)
Dr Jamie Johnson (University of Leicester) and Prof. Victoria Basham (Cardiff)
Chair: Dr Elspeth Van Veeren
The event will be held online, via Zoom. Please email secrecyresearch@gmail.com for an invite link.
More details on the talks:
Dr Ana Flamind – Secrecy and the Politics of Transgression: Encountering Limits, Producing Thresholds
This chapter argues that in order to understand secrecy binaries, such as public/private, transparent/opaque or secret/revelation, and what is produced through them, requires close attention to the conceptualisation of transgression. By engaging the works of Emile Durkheim, Georges Bataille, and Michael Taussig, it develops a politics of transgression as establishing the conditions of possibility for confronting limits. To encounter transgression is to be situated at a threshold between the sacred and the profane, the licit and the illicit, order and disorder. Transgression, understood as a threshold, not only intensifies social life but also generates effects of contamination and violence. Accordingly, this chapter argues that a politics of transgression produces a link akin to a relationship in the moment of infringement, but this relationship is ordered and compartmentalised. Unlike exclusionary practices—where the Other is constituted as an alien externality necessary for the formation of the Same—transgression engenders an Other within the Self: a Self understood as multiplicity and multitude. Crucially, these internal others should not be dismissed merely as reproductions of the Same, but rather recognised as enabling the conditions for alterity within the Self, i.e. an opening onto the radicality of experience.
Dr Jamie Johnson and Prof Victoria Basham (with co-author Dr Owen D Thomas) – Sense-Making at the End of Liberalism: Scandal, Conspiracy, Juridification
This chapter offers a conceptual framework for understanding how societies interpret and respond to ruptures in contemporary global politics through three modes of revelation: tragedy, scandal, and crisis. Each mode constitutes a distinct logic of revelation through which these ruptures are made publicly knowable, respectively, as unknowable mysteries, exposures of guilty secrets, or defacements of public secrecy. Tragedy, scandal, and crisis are dynamic and contested performances of public meaning-making which help discipline political imagination at moments of uncertainty and rupture. These modes therefore not only configure how events are interpreted, but also prompt specific repertoires of political response: from ritualised mourning, to the blaming of ‘bad apples’, to systemic reform. This chapter traces how these tragic, scandalous, and crisis-ridden meanings are then enacted through technologies, rituals, and symbolic practices – such as vigils, inquiries, apologies, and protests. This argument is illustrated through diverse empirical examples of phenomena – from war crimes to the migrant crisis – that are often claimed to be signs that liberal international order is under threat. This chapter equips researchers with tools to critically engage with the dramaturgy of a world marked by uncertainty, dysfunction, and polycrisis.
Bios:
Ana Flamind is an Early Career Researcher based with the History and Theory of International Relations chair group at the University of Groningen, in the Netherlands. She also teaches at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, in Belgium. Her work is situated at the intersection of history, sociology, and political philosophy. In the politics of scandals, she explores the assumption that certain forms of collective political manifestations that generate strong emotional reactions can form the basis of collective participation and emancipatory politics.
Jamie M Johnson (jmj14@le.ac.uk) is a Lecturer in Security, Conflict and International Development at the University of Leicester. His research focuses on the politics of scandal, transgression, and outrage. He has published in a range of journals, including European Journal of International Relations, Review of International Studies, and Millennium: Journal of International Studies. He is a member of the Secrecy, Power, and Ignorance research Network.
Victoria M Basham (BashamV@cardiff.ac.uk) is Professor of International Relations at Cardiff University. She has published extensively on military culture, war, and militarism and is a founding editor of the journal, Critical Military Studies. Victoria’s research increasingly focuses on knowledge production about violence and international order. She is particularly interested in how public sensemaking shapes knowledge around, and responses to, different forms of violence.
Owen David Thomas (o.d.thomas@exeter.ac.uk) is Associate Professor in International Relations at the University of Exeter. His research focuses on sensemaking, knowledge production, and accountability-seeking in global politics. A founding member of the Secrecy, Power, and Ignorance Network (secrecyresearch.com), he recently completed a Leverhulme Research Project on British official inquiries, Warnings from the Archive: A Century of British Intervention in the Middle East.
All welcome!