Tag Archives: critical security studies

Blog, Features, Sensing (In)Security: New Materialism and The Politics of Security

Maja Sisnowski: Gut Feeling, Adrenaline and Fried Onions: Sensing Aggression in German Health and Welfare Services

Image 1: Bunk beds in shared accommodation. Photo by Luistxo

“I don’t know how to explain it”, Caro told me in an interview, “but you develop a sense [Gespür] for when you can keep standing in front of the person, because you know: Okay, they are going to shout at you for ten minutes, and then they have used the valve that they needed. And then there are situations where you feel: Okay, I better take a step back, because it might not stay like that.”

Caro was working in one of several emergency shelters in which I observed, participated in daily tasks, and interviewed staff members as part of an ethnographic study on de-escalation practices in German health and welfare services. De-escalation is a common answer in health and welfare facilities to the question of how staff should react to aggressive behavior in a professional setting. My research project asks how de-escalation is promoted as a workplace safety measure, how it is learned and taught in de-escalation training, and how it is practiced on the ground – specifically in overnight emergency shelters for unhoused people in Berlin.

A remarkable aspect of de-escalation, especially in the context of health and welfare settings, is that it approaches aggression at a conflux of care and security practices. Many of my interlocutors, staff members in shelters and de-escalation trainers alike, understood aggression in health and welfare contexts as both potentially dangerous and as a stress response in need of caring intervention. This understanding appears even in the minute sensitivities, such as the awareness of interpersonal space, that Caro brought to situations with palpable tension: she considered both the potential needs of the other person to express frustration and the risk of the argument turning physical. For Caro as for other staff members, sensing aggression in the shelter environment was an integral part of their job. At the same time, their daily work was not in fact defined as security work, but revolved around issues such as organizing food, clothing, and access to places to sleep. In this blog post, I trace how aggression is sensed in the shelters to show how the sensing of in/security is entangled with institutional care and welfare provision.

Security, following Laufenberg and Thompson (2022) and the long line of feminist, anti-racist and abolitionist thinkers they draw on, is a powerful and expansive formation of governance, deeply intertwined with capitalist modes of producing crisis and insecurity. A critical analysis of security asks what versions of security and safety are being produced, whose safety is prioritized, and who is constructed as a threat. Such questions are integral to studying how aggression is sensed and encountered, given the uneven attribution of aggression in conjunction with the production of gendered, racialized, classed and dis/abled difference (Longino 2013; Metzl 2011; Rollins 2021; Chen 2023). In the context of health and social welfare services, the production of difference in relation to aggression is also enmeshed with the apprehension and management of aggression in institutional spaces, especially those designated for particular populations, such as homeless people. Tracing how emergency shelter staff senses aggression can help articulate how aggression is present in institutional spaces, and how it is apprehended in caring and securitizing registers.

A Situated Sensorium for Aggression

The shelters in my research formed part of a perpetually precarious and semi-professional emergency service meant to protect people from cold-related harm at night. They were usually sought out by people who could not access housing and were excluded from or rendered precarious within Germany’s regular social support system. Winter emergency shelters require people to eat and sleep in shared, crowded and regulated spaces that are usually only open during the winter months and during the night. Responsible for enforcing the rules of shelter space, shelter staff were also tasked with keeping the space “free of violence”. This entailed intervening in case of conflict and asking people who were violent to leave the premises. In many shelters, this was done in cooperation with externally hired security staff. In this context, many staff members told me that they were attentive to loud voices to detect a potentially escalating situation. Susanne shared:

When I sit in the office for example, or also at night when I sleep there, then I always listen a lot to what is happening. So I hear when people are having a conversation, and I really pay attention to whether someone is raising their voice, and then I always have to wait whether that is part of the conversation, because someone is telling a story, or whether that is because a conflict is happening.

Aggression, in other words, was not simply heard, it was actively listened for. This active sensing was not practiced in isolation, but in a particular spatial arrangement and within an institutional context where staff could not be everywhere all at once yet bore responsibility to intervene when someone showed aggressive behavior. Sensing aggression, this example shows, is a matter of practice, to be distinguished from the idea of sensing as a passive perception of a given object which comes to the senses. While people in my research certainly had different sensitivities and attunements to aggression, there were commonalities as well, shaped by institutional roles– one could call it a situated sensorium. Notably, as with the sensitivity for raised voices, this sensing of aggression amidst everyday interactions such as a loud conversation also constituted a form of low-tech surveillance in the shelters.

Sensing Stress, Constituting Risk

A situated sensorium encompasses multiple sensitivities, for sounds, touch, embodied states, and institutional routines and atmospheres. Another staff member, when I asked if escalating situations could be sensed beforehand, explained:

Yes, when an argument blows up a bit, then you can hear from the kitchen that it’s somehow getting louder in the eating area, then yes. Of course adrenaline enters into it as well: “Oh God, I’ll go check what is going on there.”

As “adrenaline enters into it”, this staff member’s description introduces a sense of her own embodied response. The sensorial repertoire of sensing aggression in the shelter importantly included such interoceptive sensitivities. Adrenaline was one shorthand way of describing physical sensations of stress (Roberts 2024) to be sensed in oneself, but potentially also in others. Interestingly, adrenaline itself is given agency in this description, causing an impulse to go and check out what the noise is about. Several staff members explained how being aware of their own stress was important for them to be effective de-escalators, and de-escalation training would usually sensitize participants to the signs that they themselves were under stress.

But even more central to staff members was the stress of others. They often described having an awareness for people’s moods as well as for more general atmospheres. They sensed risks of aggression in long waiting times in cold weather, cramped spaces, interrupted sleep, and the small violences of what Goffman has aptly called “batch living” (Goffman 1961 [2022], 10) remarking that certain experiences would make them angry and impatient, too. This sensitivity, I would argue, renders aggression palpable as material-semiotically constituted risk in the institutional space of the shelters, not simply monitored and managed, but also related to vital needs such as sleep, warmth and dignity.

Dis/orienting Gut Feelings

Another register of interoceptive sensing within staff’s situated sensorium, and one I encountered frequently in my research, was gut feeling. Like adrenaline and stress, gut feeling presents as an internal sensation, metaphorically sitting in the pit of the stomach. Akin to the sense [Gespür] that Caro described, gut feeling and related notions were used by research participants to describe modes of knowing that, being grounded in experience and context, resisted articulation in general terms. In the realm of police work, the use of neurobiological discourse (Keesman 2022), as well as reliance on experiential knowledge (Abdul-Rahman et al. 2020, 34) has been critically analyzed as to how it can function as a refusal of articulation and accountability (see also Elbek 2025). In my research, where staff had markedly different mandates and powers, gut feeling served to denote a sense of being oriented and secure in one’s fast and intuitive assessments. In this vein, for example, several staff members explained that they would tell new colleagues to rely on and follow their gut feeling, especially to sense whether a situation was dangerous.

For me as a researcher, gut feeling became especially tangible when I noticed my own senses of in/security morph and shift throughout my research. This happened for example when I moved from a small shelter where I had previously worked to larger shelters with more security staff, or when I noticed myself grow impractically sensitive to the risk of aggression after participant observation in a great number of de-escalation training sessions. Having prior work experience in a shelter, these small disorientations made me aware of how much I did rely in practice on a well-working gut feeling, but they also gave me an embodied notion of how senses of in/security are grounded in specific social arrangements.

Entanglements of Care and Security

Importantly, within the context of the shelter environment, as well as in de-escalation training, I also came across registers of sensing in/security that were not oriented towards sensing danger. When I asked Britta about whether escalating situations announced themselves beforehand, our conversation turned to food:

When [people] know good food is coming, they are looking forward to it. But when it’s announced that there is rice…or couscous…! (Laughter). We are not friends anymore then. […] The first time in my life, I was homesick because I was on a trip and the food was bad […] One time, I was frying onions for dinner, really a lot of onions. And onions always smell so incredibly delicious. And then, [X] came in, and said: (sniffing the air) Home, sweet Home. Polska. Or something like it, he signaled that it smells like home […] And that’s a good feeling, because I think everyone knows this, some smells are just familiar and the smell of fried onions brings humanity together. (Laughter)

Throughout my research, I came not only across sensitivities towards danger and risk, but also encountered sensitivities to smells, tastes, or touch, that feel safe or give a sense of home, connection or pleasure. Including such sensitivities in a sensorium for in/security sheds light on entanglements of care and security while also opening possibilities of thinking security beyond efforts of securitization and surveillance. Laufenberg and Thompson describe how abolitionist and care-ethical criticisms of contemporary security regimes attempt to redefine security: “In this vein, not more carceral security – and hence more police, more punishment, more surveillance and more sealing of borders – is the appropriate answer to (social) insecurity, but more care – and thus more resonance, connection, and responsivity, more care, responsibility and solidarity.” (Laufenberg and Thompson 2022, 32, my translation).

What, against this backdrop, does it mean to grow sensitive to loud voices, to prize gut feeling, sense adrenaline, and smell the fried onions?

For one, attending to staff’s situated sensorium for aggression in the shelters highlights the ambivalences and confluences of care and security within the asymmetrical power relations of institutional encounters. It shows subtle ways in which policing and securitization is present in spaces of care or welfare provision. At the same time, I suggest, this sensorium can be read as reaching – without being able to transcend its institutional context – for ways of feeling safe beyond carceral security.

Maja Sisnowski is a PhD candidate with the Health, Care and the Body research group at the University of Amsterdam. Her research interests move in the fields of feminist science and technology studies, critical disability studies, care and security.

References

Abdul-Rahman, Laila; Espín Grau, Hannah; Klaus, Luise and Tobias Singelnstein. 2020: Rassismus und Diskriminierungserfahrungen im Kontext polizeilicher Gewaltausübung. Zweiter Zwischenbericht zum Forschungsprojekt „Körperverletzung im Amt durch Poli-zeibeamt*innen“ (KviAPol). Ruhr-Universität Bochum, 11.11.2020, https://kviapol.rub.de.

Chen, Mel Y. 2023. Intoxicated: Race, Disability, and Chemical Intimacy across Empire. Anima: Critical Race Studies Otherwise. Durham: Duke University Press. doi:10.1215/9781478027447.

Elbek, Laust Lund. 2025. “Sniffing Out Trouble? What and How The ‘Police Nose’ Smells.” FocaalBlog, December 24 https://www.focaalblog.com/2025/12/24/laust-lund-elbek-sniffing-out-trouble-what-and-how-the-police-nose-smells/

Goffman, Erving. 1961 [2022]. Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates. Penguin Modern Classics. Penguin Books.

Keesman, Laura Danique. 2022. “Primordial Brains and Bodies: How Neurobiological Discourses Shape Policing Experiences.” Body & Society 28 (4): 80–105. doi:10.1177/1357034X221134440.

Laufenberg, Mike, and Vanessa Eileen Thompson, eds. 2022. Sicherheit: rassismuskritische und feministische Beiträge. 1. Auflage. Forum Frauen- und Geschlechterforschung, Band 49. Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot.

Longino, Helen E. 2013. Studying Human Behavior: How Scientists Investigate Aggression and Sexuality. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Metzl, Jonathan Michel. 2011. The Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia Became a Black Disease. Boston, Mass: Beacon.

Roberts, Celia. 2024. “Adrenaline.” In Hormonal Theory: A Rebellious Glossary, edited by Andrea Ford, Roslyn Malcom, Sonja Erikainen, Lisa Raeder, and Celia Roberts, 15–23. Bloomsbury UK.

Rollins, Oliver. 2021. Conviction: The Making and Unmaking of the Violent Brain. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.

Cite as: Sisnowski, M. 2025. “Gut Feeling, Adrenaline and Fried Onions: Sensing Aggression in German Health and Welfare Services” Focaalblog January 24. https://www.focaalblog.com/2026/01/23/maja-sisnowski-gut-feeling-adrenaline-and-fried-onions-sensing-aggression-in-german-health-and-welfare-services/

Blog, Features, Sensing (In)Security: New Materialism and The Politics of Security

Beatrice Jauregui: Anxious Anticipations: Border-crossing In/security and the Implosion of the US-led Global Order

Image 1: Akwesasne territory. Source: Mohawk Council of Akwesasne

Born on US soil to citizen parents, I applied for my first passport at age 12, when my grandma took me with her to visit Italy and Greece for two weeks. My biggest concern then was packing my best clothes and how the passport picture unfortunately highlighted my crooked teeth and frizzy hair. Ten years later, I renewed the passport to make my second trip overseas, this time to go to India to do independent student research on a grant from my university. Imagine my awe and confusion when—thanks to a letter of introduction by an Indian government official whom I met through a professor—I was able to bypass the customs and immigration lines with a police escort at the airport in New Delhi and get my passport stamped without question in a back office before being shuttled into a gleaming white ambassador car to meet with a senior police officer. These early experiences crossing international borders were therefore smooth. They contrast dramatically with experiences shared by people who have long been Othered and constructed as suspect in various ways. Precisely this sensory experience has become more salient for me recently.

On an episode of The Chris Hedges Report podcast, Canadian writer Omar El Akkad talks about growing up with a “cultural survival kit” that (in large part) traces back to his witnessing a soldier interrogating his father at a checkpoint in Egypt. He says he is always anxious to go through airport border security, and points to how so many people more or less like him (i.e., brown skinned and/or naturalized citizens, with names indexing certain national or religious identities, perhaps with different accents to their spoken English) are “regularly dragged into secondary” inspection at US (or other) border crossings. El Akkad shares that this pervasive experience involves things like “pre-emptively preparing” for interactions with government agents “and trying to put them at ease” so as to suggest to them “don’t be scared” of me. He notes how over time he realized that it would behoove him to behave less “yes, sir, no sir” formally with border security officers, and instead act “more casual because that’s how people who are from here are behaving”. He remarks how only some feel “the cumulative effect” of how border securitization intersects with racism and other forms of discrimination. This is just one account of ways that marginalized peoples sense and embody insecurity at official border crossings globally through consciously altered comportment—never mind the millions who annually attempt to migrate unofficially or illegally, often risking or losing their lives.

I moved to Toronto for work over a decade ago and am now a dual citizen of both Canada and the US. Until recently, crossing between these countries felt easy, oiled by trusted traveler programs and historically friendly political economic relations. The only thing that ever “detained” me was a lonely border agent posted at a remote intersection of western Quebec/upstate New York, who was thinking of going back to school and wanted to chit-chat when he asked about my business and I told him about my scholarly research and teaching on police. He got an impromptu 20 minutes “office hours” session, and it was mildly endearing since that afternoon I was not in a rush while returning to Akwesasne from doing some fieldwork with members of their sister community in Kahnawà:ke, which is a Kanien’kehá:ke (Mohawk) territory near Tiohtià:ke (Montreal). The first time I felt significant anxiety about crossing this complex international boundary was a few days later, when I was informed by Canadian border agents that I could be fined thousands of dollars and my car seized because I had inadvertently not followed proper reporting procedures while conducting research in Akwesasne, a territory that straddles both the US-Canada border, and also the provincial border between Ontario and Quebec.

Akwesasne’ronon (the Kanien’ké:ha word for members of this Indigenous community) experience the insecurity, jurisdictional confusion, and exclusionary power of international border enforcement every day, since boundary lines zigzag irregularly through their land (Image 1). People joke about homes where the kitchen is in Canada and the living room is in the US, and relate far less amusing struggles over which problematic governing agreements dictate action on everything from commercial licenses to speeding tickets and the illegal trafficking of drugs, firearms, and human beings through the territory. As members of a sovereign First Nation recognized by both Canadian and US federal governments, Akwesasne’rono have special rights to move around their territory as needed without incident or incrimination. Unlike US or Canadian citizens—and with the exception of several designated crossings where there are special “express” lanes only accessible to Indigenous people with “native status” cards—Akwesasne’rono are not required to “check in” with officials when they traverse the border, not least since it would be impractical, often impossible to do so. But even people with all of their status documents in order have shared countless stories about being routinely questioned, detained, investigated, or otherwise inconvenienced—and reminded of their colonized Other-ness—by government agents on all sides. One community member with a status card even reported that he had to sit for several hours at a checkpoint one weekday after getting a medical X-ray, since agents detected radiation on him and classified it as suspicious and indicative of a potential security threat.

It is hardly news that even some of the most supposedly “friendly” and “porous” borders for some—especially persons privileged to have passports from globally powerful countries or other types of legitimating documentation—have long been places of anxiety, uncertainty, frustration, fear, paranoia, and terror for others, particularly people identified with groups facing prejudice and discrimination on the basis of indigeneity, nationality, race, religion, and other markers of cultural difference. Many in this latter category have become used to embodied experiences of sensing insecurity in a liminal space of exceptional, arbitrary, and mostly unchecked power meted out by state authority figures.

Recently however, and increasingly so, persons in the former (privileged) category, including myself, have begun sensing insecurity in borderlands as well. A stark case followed the re-election of Donald Trump as US President on a platform that included hard-line anti-immigrant and blatantly racist ideologies. Many have watched with horror as these ideologies play out in constant news streams about ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) raids leading to the kidnapping and deportation of thousands of people across the US. Simultaneously, there are many stories circulating more or less publicly about increasingly arbitrary allegations of “anti-Americanism” and “national security threats” suspicions against persons who express dissent against or negative evaluations of some of the regime’s destructive and incoherent policies.

There are now many news accounts of foreign nationals getting caught up in the US immigration-detention dragnet since the beginning of 2025, sometimes allegedly due to procedural errors or miscommunications. Governments, NGOs, universities, business corporations, and others have been issuing travel warnings to their constituents, advising on how to respond to increased surveillance, search and seizure of electronic devices, denial of entry, and possible detention depending on one’s citizenship status. Stories have been circulating about people having their passports marked with a five-year ban from entering the US simply for being critical of the Trump regime. All of this is of course alarming for millions of people who have any sort of relationship with or reason to travel to the US. And it has dramatically shifted my own sense of in/security, even as someone with all of the (supposed) rights of US citizenship, and the privileges associated with being a well-educated descendent of white European settlers with no criminal record. Before traveling to the US, I now always anticipate interrogation. I carefully review the content of all of my devices; rehearse what I might say if questioned; and even give my children instructions on what (not) to say and do when we travel together. I have never been so anxious when passing through Canada-US border checkpoints, sometimes to the point of feeling physically ill, or unable to eat, bordering on panic attacks, even though I know “rationally” that I have done nothing wrong or anything that should warrant increased scrutiny or sanction.

My exponential increase in anxiety around crossing into the US is not simply speculative paranoia based on distant doomster social media stories and second-hand rumors. It emerges out of two specific circumstances related to expressed recognition of state violence. Foremost is a history of speaking out against occupation, apartheid, and genocide in Palestine/Israel (Bangstad 2025), to the extent that I have been profiled alongside thousands of others on the defamatory Canary Mission website with false charges of being antisemitic and pro-Hamas, and of allegedly supporting “terrorism”. I have viewed documented evidence of persons listed on this untrustworthy propaganda website being interrogated about it explicitly in secondary inspections at the US border; and in some cases, if someone was not a US citizen, they were reportedly banned and denied entry to the US. This is part of a larger pattern of the current US government’s weaponization of antisemitism as a smoke screen to try to bring universities and other institutions to heel with threats of rescinding of federal funding, canceling of work and study visas, and banning international student admissions as punishments or “warnings” for not falling in line with regime policies or allowing open protest of war crimes and atrocities. I admit to feeling afraid even now as I write this, and hope this will not cause harm in the future.

The other key factor that has amplified my sense of anticipatory insecurity about border crossings more generally relates back to my decades of research in India on police and security infrastructure. After some critical comments I made in independent media about harmful discriminatory policies and practices of the Hindutva (Hindu nationalist) government that has now been in power there for more than a decade, representatives from the Indian consulate came to my house in Toronto and issued me a “show cause notice”, criminalizing me for alleged “anti-national” activities that violate “the sovereignty and integrity of India”, and accusing me of “clandestine activities” in relation to my research. The charges are as absurd as they are baseless, and a Delhi-based lawyer has done their best to set me up well to fight these allegations in court as needed. But the government’s strategy of harassment and intimidation has compelled me to self-censor. While I still write candidly in scholarly sources about my research, I am more hesitant to respond to inquiries from journalists requesting comments on politically sensitive matters. And while many friends and colleagues already know about this old “news” of my essentially being blacklisted from a place I have considered another home for decades, this is the first time that I’m sharing it publicly in writing, more than three years after state officials first darkened my doorstep. Meanwhile, I have not attempted to return to India, even though I technically still have what is known as OCI (Overseas Citizenship of India) status. I have read and heard about many stories of other persons with this status having their cards revoked, and I fear arriving at that airport—where, recall, I was once able to bypass the long lines of foreign passport holders even though I had never before set foot in the country—only to be deported immediately, like other colleagues who have been unfortunately caught up in the Indian government’s dragnet of nationalistic hyper-securitization.

This is how state harassment and repression of dissent have always worked, of course; through instilling generalized suspicion along ideological divides, engendering amorphous anxiety that accumulates like moss, and shapeshifts into intensified fear and paranoia that spreads like a contagion. Rapidly changing technological capacities aside, most of the routine and exceptional tactics, strategies, and outcomes of potential and actual state violence are not new. But their sensory impact on new populations, and in relation to US power specifically, indicates substantive and seismic shifts. One key feature of these shifts is the increasingly blurry “border” between a palpable fear of mere “inconvenience” (perhaps I’ll miss a flight, or my phone will be seized at the border and I won’t ever get it back) versus the probability of a seriously harmful impact on peoples’ lives (perhaps I’ll be detained indefinitely, or they’ll do a full forensic image of my seized device that will lead to serious legal or financial complications, never mind the violations of privacy). Scaling up and out, it also seems that we are witnessing significant realignments and sea changes in the global order of political economic power, heretofore dominated by the US through what some have called “empire” in the post 1945-era.

Returning to El Akkad’s reflections, he acknowledges that as someone with the privilege of Canadian citizenship, his border-crossing fears have been, if not “silly” (his word), then still mostly about trying to ensure “as few headaches as possible” and to prevent the potential hassle of losing time, money, or equipment. For me as a dual citizen, I would like to continue to feel that the worst I might suffer at the Canada-US border is a short period of detention until I could obtain legal representation. But there is a growing sense that what appears to be intensified and unpredictable border interrogations of anyone and everyone—not just the “usual suspects”, which of course has always been “unjust”—may only get worse, and that the “normal” national and international legal protections may not hold, such that even citizens who don’t protest too much may be subject to extraordinary rendition. It feels like I now know more people than not who express some version of this fear on a regular basis, and especially in the lead up to a trip crossing the US border—or in a decision to avoid going to the US altogether, which also now seems far more common. The boundary between nuisance and violence has become more than a little insecure.

The (again) not new or unique, and yet intensified and arguably more-prevalent-than-ever, sense of insecurity around crossing borders into the US is also indicative of concerns well beyond just mobility and migration. It indexes the decline and fall of political economic forms and cultural ways of life that many people, including some of the wealthiest and heretofore well-protected and well-served by the US-led global order, have long enjoyed and don’t want to let go. Among other touchstones of security, it seems that US-based global and national governing institutions, free speech, legal and regulatory bodies, human and civil rights, social services, educational opportunities, and trust in mediated knowledge production are disintegrating across the board. Many try to go on as before, hoping for a savior in litigation, legislation, or perhaps a new leader, assuming the next US national election occurs on schedule. This mass tendency to “keep calm and carry on” seems to have a deeper sensory structure than mere maintenance of morale in the face of widespread and ongoing degeneration. Perhaps it exhibits something more akin to what Alexei Yurchak (2005) has called “hypernormalization” in the context of the end of Soviet Russia, wherein people expressed a strong sense that things would always continue as they had, even as their world was falling apart around them. I cannot predict with any precision the long-term or even immediate future of the US-led Global Order. But the fluctuations and increasing sense of creeping dread and acute terror that I now feel every time I approach the border of the country of my birth signify the insecurity, if not the complete implosion, of so much that so many of us have always thought to be true and trusted.

Beatrice Jauregui is Associate Professor at the University of Toronto Centre for Criminology and Sociolegal Studies. She is author of Provisional Authority: Police, Order, and Security in India and co-editor of the Sage Handbook of Global Policing and Anthropology and Global Counterinsurgency.  

References

Bangstad, Sindre 2025. “The IHRA Working Definition of Antisemitism and Academic Freedom” Focaalblog 28 March, https://www.focaalblog.com/2025/03/28/sindre-bangstad-the-ihra-working-definition-of-antisemitism-and-academic-freedom/

Yurchak, Alexei. 2005. Everything Was Forever Until It Was No More. The Last Soviet Generation. Princeton University Press.

Cite as: Jauregui, B. 2025. “Anxious Anticipations: Border-crossing In/security and the Implosion of the US-led Global Order” Focaalblog December 22. https://www.focaalblog.com/2025/12/22/beatrice-jauregui-anxious-anticipations-border-crossing-in-security-and-the-implosion-of-the-us-led-global-order/

Blog, Features, Sensing (In)Security: New Materialism and The Politics of Security

Jolien van Veen: Atmospheric Security in Rio de Janeiro

Image 1: Exú Tranca Rua (left) and Maria Padilha das 7 Encruzilhadas (right) depicted on the walls of the center. Photo by author.

When I started fieldwork in neighborhoods in Rio de Janeiro’s North zone in December 2021, the first thing my Brazilian friends told me was to be very careful. The area where I was based was notorious for its high number of armed robberies and for its proximity to a cluster of favelas. Shortly before my arrival in Brazil, the drug trafficking group that effectively controlled the favelas had expanded its territory by blocking roads and installing armed checkpoints at various street corners across the neighborhoods. The local leader (dono) of the group, who identified as a Pentecostal Christian, was accused of orchestrating disappearances, homicides, and extortions, and of destroying temples dedicated to Afro-Brazilian religious practices.

It was against this backdrop of violent events that I conducted an interview with Catarina, a frequent visitor of a local Umbanda center. Umbanda is an Afro-Brazilian religion that contains influences from Roman Catholicism, West-African religious traditions, indigenous beliefs, and Kardecist spiritism. In Umbanda, spiritual guides provide guidance and support on matters of health, money, love, and wellbeing. Catarina lived with her teenage daughter in a commercial district some 15 minutes away from the center, outside the zone of influence of the drug trafficking gang. As we sat in the patio of the center, shaded by the trees that surrounded the open space in front of the terreiro (indoor place of worship), I asked Catarina whether she hadn’t considered visiting a center located closer to her home in an area that was considered less dangerous. She responded the following:

There is a center close to me, which I visit sometimes, but I am not from that center. And I feel very much at peace here. Inside here, it doesn’t feel like I am in this particular neighborhood. It is as if a microclimate (microclima) was created inside here, with the trees and all that. Even if it takes forever for the sessions to start. If you arrive all worked up, inside here you are able to relax, think about life. And thank God, nothing has ever happened to us here. I think that is our protection (é proteção mesmo). Protection that the center gives, which the spirits (entidades) from here give until we arrive at our house. Because nothing ever happened when we left here. While everything is deserted, everything is black.

I was intrigued by Catarina’s attention to the atmospheric qualities of protection. Like other Umbanda practitioners whom I spoke to, Catarina spoke about the protection offered by the center as a material and embodied reality where the dangers of the street were temporarily kept at bay. This is a material and embodied reality that emerges through a series of ritual practices that involve an interplay between objects, bodies, and spirit entities, amongst other things. I offer two examples to illustrate the interplay between these different materialities inside the center.

Champagne and cigarettes

The largest altar in the Umbanda center was dedicated to a group of spirits known collectively as the spirits of the streets (povo da rua). It was located inside a separate building in the courtyard, closed off with an opaque door. The outside wall depicted a large mural painting of the Exú Tranca Rua, protector of the terreiros, and the pomba-gira Maria Padilha das 7 Encruzilhadas, guardian of love, protection, and courage (Image 1). Both figures play an important role in the center as they are called upon to cleanse the center from negative energies (limpar), to open new ways of thinking and being (abrir caminhos) and to shield practitioners from harm (proteger). Because of their ability to protect, the povo da rua are also referred to as guardian spirits (guardiões).

Different from other kinds of spirits, who emphasize benevolence and humility, the povo da rua embody sensuality as well as force. When they incorporate the bodies of the spirit mediums, they dance, smoke, drink, and flirt. To outsiders, the spirits’ human appetites are sometimes mistaken for sinful behavior and for provoking “bad things” (fazer mal). But for my interlocutors, “exú only does good things” (faz bem).

Inside the altar of the povo, a faint red light revealed a row of thirteen statues, representing particular spirits worshipped in the center. Twice a year, the povo receive an extensive offering (oferenda) from the spirit mediums to request guidance and protection for themselves or on behalf of a friend or a family member.

The offerings that I witnessed followed a specific order and were carried out individually. First, a big plate filled with tropical fruits was brought to the altar. The medium then took a pull of a cigarette to appease thefemale spirits. The remaining packet of cigarettes was placed alongside the plate of fruits on the altar. Next, the medium filled a glass of champagne. After taking a sip of the glass, the glass was also placed in front of the statues. To appease the male spirits, the medium took a pull of a cigar and exhaled in the shape of a circle. He or she then filled a glass of cachaça (white rum), took a sip, and placed it on the altar. In the final step, the spirit medium placed a handful of coins in a clay bowl. One of the coins was used to slowly move it over the body, starting with arms crossed, and then directing the coin over the head, knees, legs, and under one of the feet.

The individual offerings were complemented by the traditional food offering for exús, prepared in the small on-site kitchen: a big bowl of toasted manioc flour prepared in Dendê oil, filled with red chili peppers. Softly burning candles and vases filled with red roses and small white flowers were tucked in between the offerings (Image 2). According to the mediums, each of the items placed on the altar to feed the spirits absorbs the spirits’ capacity to cleanse and protect and contributes to the circulation of positive energy and spiritual force inside the center.

The process of preparing the offerings and placing them inside the altar took several hours. After about two weeks, once the offerings were received and “eaten” by the spirits, they were removed from the altar. The rotten fruits were discarded, and the ones that were still edible were taken back home. The flowers, cigarettes, candles, and manioc flower were dispatched near one of the city’s highway intersections, to serve those who wander through the city.

According to Zezé, one of the mediums who works at the center, the offerings to the spirits were not made in vain. When I spoke to him in an interview, he said the following:

The guardian spirits protect those who have faith. Up until today, inside here nothing bad has ever happened, while in the meantime a lot of bad things have happened outside. We’ve had cases where violence happened outside of the gate, shots were being fired, but not even the bullet shells made it in here. That, to me, is proof that this is a protected place.

Zezé’s words echoed those of Catarina. Despite the dangers that surrounded the center, in the comforting presence of the povo da rua, no bullets would pierce the center’s walls.

Image 2: Offerings for the povo da rua. Photo by author.

The swords of Ogum

Besides offerings to the spirits, mediums also channeled spiritual energy through incorporation sessions (giras). One of the sessions I attended at the center was dedicated to Ogum, an orixá associated with strength, courage, and battle. Inspired by African deities, orixás are at the top of the spiritual hierarchy in Umbanda. The session for Ogum was held in the indoor space adjacent to the courtyard where all the spirit incorporations took place. The entire room was painted light blue. Walls were covered with paintings, photos of mediums and visitors, and small spirit altars. A small sign right behind the door read “negative energies prohibited.”

Just like the other sessions, the session for Ogum started with a short prayer followed by drumming. The repetitive drum rhythm worked to induce a trance-like state amongst the mediums and the visitors. One by one, the spirits announced themselves through the bodies of the mediums, which were slowly moving towards the center of the room, with one leg lagging the other and their index fingers pointed out. Their reception was welcomed by the audience, whose clapping and singing grew louder as more spirits descended onto the room:

Eu tenho sete espadas pra me defenderI have seven swords to defend myself
Eu tenho Ogum em minha companhiaI have Ogum in my company
Eu tenho sete espadas pra me defenderI have seven swords to defend myself
Eu tenho Ogum em minha companhiaI have Ogum in my company
Ogum é meu paiOgum is my father
Ogum é meu guiaOgum is my guide
Ogum é meu paiOgum is my father
Na fé de ZambiIn the name of Zambi (the Creator)
E da Virgem MariaAnd the Virgin Mary

By the time Ogum finally announced his presence through the body of a medium it was already close to midnight. A spiritual caretaker guided Ogum to a room in the back of the building to prepare his costume. In the meantime, the other spirit mediums took a single leaf each from the sansevieria plant in the front of the room. A few moments later, Ogum re-entered the room with the air of a dignified man, wearing a red cape, a sword, and a knight’s helmet adorned with a red feather. The other mediums held up their leaves in the air and formed an arch (image 3). Carefully, Ogum was led under the arch and made his way to the front of the altar, where he greeted the mediums and the visitors with an embrace.

Towards the end of the session, the mediums handed each of the visitors one of the leaves to take back home and place it in front of their house. The “swords”, I was told, were considered as an extension of the protective power of Ogum cultivated during the session and served to protect the house from negative energies and to attract prosperity (prosperidade).

Image 3: The swords of Ogum. Photo by author.

Reflections

There is no shortage of people seeking protection and guidance in Brazilian cities, which statistics show are among the most violent on earth. Trapped between militias, drug trafficking groups, and the state, urban residents cultivate spaces where they feel safe, comfortable, and cared for. These spaces of security and comfort are rarely secular. They are inhabited by a range of otherworldly entities who are called upon to protect and to heal (see also Amoruso 2025. Willis 2024), including Afro-Brazilian spirits.

I have illustrated how Afro-Brazilian spirits and the mediums who incorporate them engage in affective relationships that contribute to a sacred, intimate space shielded from the dangers of the street. Each of the objects placed within the center takes part in this affective relationship in different ways: not merely in a symbolic manner, but by absorbing and circulating the spirit’s powers to cleanse, heal, and protect. The champagne and cigarettes on the altar dedicated to the guardian spirits become charged with spiritual powers, while the swords of Ogum, represented by the sansevieria leaves, become an extension of the protective power of the orixá.

My analysis moves from an understanding of security as something that is produced on the level of the state towards an understanding of security as something that is lived and felt in everyday interactions (see also Ghertner, McFann & Goldstein 2020: 3). Moreover, like Anderson (2009), I draw attention to the atmospheric quality of security as an affect that emerges between objects, bodies, and spaces. For ethnographers, it is essential to do justice to the ways in which the senses shape our everyday experiences and ontological realities.

Jolien van Veen is a PhD researcher at the department of Cultural Anthropology at Utrecht University. Her PhD is part of the ERC-funded project “Sacralizing Security: Religion, Violence and Authority in Mega-Cities of the Global South”. She has published in City & Society and the European Review of Latin American and Caribbean Studies.

References

Amoruso, Michael. 2025. Moved by the Dead: Haunting and Devotion in São Paulo, Brazil. University of North Carolina Press.

Anderson, Ben. 2009. “Affective Atmospheres”. Emotion, Space and Society 2: 77-81. DOI:10.1016/j.emospa.2009.08.005

Ghertner, D. Asher, Hudson McFann, and Daniel M. Goldstein, 2020. Futureproof: Security Aesthetics and the Management of Life. Duke University Press.

Willis, Laurie Denyer. 2023. Go With God: Political Exhaustion and Evangelical Possibility in Suburban Brazil. University of California Press.

Cite as: Veen, Jolien van 2025. “Atmospheric Security in Rio de Janeiro” Focaalblog December 22. https://www.focaalblog.com/2025/12/22/jolien-van-veen-atmospheric-security-in-rio-de-janeiro/

Blog, Features, Sensing (In)Security: New Materialism and The Politics of Security

Tessa Diphoorn and Tomas Salem: Introduction: Sensing (In)Security. New Materialism and The Politics of Security

Image 1: Military police officer patrolling in Mangueira, Brazil. Photo by Tomas Salem

Palm Springs, mid-September 2025. The American flag flies at half-staff across the city in honour of Charlie Krik, right-wing political activist and Trump supporter who was shot and killed in Utah at the beginning of the month.

While gun violence is not foreign to Americans, the assassination of Kirk is met with shock, anger, and disbelief by many, but also with glee and a sense of divine justice by others, as Kirk ardently opposed gun control policies across his social media platforms, including his wildly popular podcast show.

In Palm Springs’ affluent middle-class neighbourhoods, a young couple working in the local art industry is quick to note the irony. They are not Trump supporters and politically far from the far-right, but like many Americans, they own guns which they use both for protection and play.

When a stranger passes out on the sidewalk in front of their home, smelling alcohol and old sweat, the guns offer a sense of security, and are carried as a precautionary measure. While the couple have sympathy for the man and his obvious suffering, they emphasise that this is a family neighbourhood. The kids that live here should not be exposed to these scenes.

As the young couple debates how to address the situation, a neighbour pulls up in a big, white pick-up truck. He wears a spotless, white polo shirt with SECURITY embroidered on the chest and carries a gun on his hip. Taking charge of the situation, he calls the police, who soon arrive to detain the man sleeping on the street corner.

The neighbours chat while they wait for the officers to arrive, and the security man explains that he lives a few houses down the road, that he is a former marine and police officer, and that he likes to keep his neighbourhood safe. The man is friendly and polite, and offers his number to the young couple, should they ever need assistance.

And indeed, they soon do: their roommate is a former substance addict and apparently, as the couple eventually speculate, also a practitioner of some sort of black magic. When he is asked not to treat himself to the soda cans that are in the fridge, he spirals into an escalating episode of rage.

He yells at them to fuck off at the top of his lungs, his anger reverberating through the home. “I have never felt so disrespected in my life,” Rob, the male half of the couple asserts. Over the next days and weeks, tension between the couple and the roommate builds as they try to evict him. “Oh yes, we all own guns,” Rob dryly notes when asked if the evicted roommate is armed.

Eventually, after weeks of emotional distress, they call on their security neighbour to negotiate the conditions of the roommates’ eviction. They commended his professional and calm demeanour. Their impression of the vigilante has changed from scepticism to trust. They feel safer that he is around, and prefer his assistance to that of the police—at least on this occasion.

As they clean out their old roommate’s room, they find bone fragments, human teeth, and a doll that they describe as having an unsettling energy. They burn the teeth in their yard and cleanse the room with sage and incense.

The scenes from contemporary US, observed by Tomas Salem, show how sensations of (in)security are perceived, constructed, and negotiated through a set of materialities that include guns, social media, unsettling bodies, national symbols, mind-altering substances, and ontologically ambiguous objects, as well as perceived energies, political pundits, and the institutions and agencies usually associated with the provision of security.

Some of these elements, such as guns, are commonly linked to the field of security and evoke strong emotions, reactions, and opinions.

Firearms are habitually subjected to processes of political polarisation and simultaneously perceived as elements of risk or guarantors of safety. Similarly, unsettling bodies—the drunk, the migrant, the racialised, or the emotionally volatile—also shape feelings of (un)safety and fear. Additionally, ontological assumptions about the life of objects can produce feelings of anxiety, restlessness, or insecurity, or they can calm such feelings.

Over the past decade, scholars and artists alike have begun to rethink security not just as a set of institutions or policies, but as something deeply felt, material, and sensory. From drone surveillance to facial recognition, from border fences to biometric databases, security today is not only managed through laws and strategies; it is experienced through bodies, affects, and technologies. The hum of a CCTV camera, the buzz of a phone alert, or the tension in a checkpoint queue all contribute to how security takes shape in everyday life.

In this series, we place the sensorial at the forefront of anthropological inquiry into everyday practices and understandings of (in)security.

What does it mean to sense security? Anthropologists working with ideas from new materialism and posthumanist thought have helped push this conversation forward. Rather than seeing humans as the only actors in our analysis of security, these perspectives draw attention to the agency of things and examine how technologies, infrastructures, and environments participate in producing (in)security.

The concept of sensing here works in multiple directions: humans sense danger or safety, but sensors, algorithms, and data infrastructures also “sense” the world, classifying and responding in ways that shape our collective experience. Security becomes not just something we enforce or feel, but something co-produced by human and nonhuman actors alike.

New materialist approaches remind us that sensing is never neutral. The technologies that claim to detect threat or measure risk often reproduce the same racialized and colonial hierarchies that have long structured the security field.

In this sense, studying sensing and materiality is also about uncovering how inequalities are embedded in the very textures of security, in codes, in infrastructures, and in atmospheres.

In this feature, we are interested in better understanding how embodied emotional registers are manipulated in political projects, especially those responding to widespread anxieties about the future. To sense (in)security is to inhabit a world where matter, technology, and emotion converge.

Which lives and movements are rendered visible, and which remain unseen? How do certain bodies become “suspicious” in the eyes of a security guard, vigilante neighbour, or algorithm?

By focusing on the sensorial as the locus of interplay between materiality and experience, and thus, of our ontology or perception of reality, the contributions reveal the nuanced dialectics of security and insecurity in contemporary life.

Key to this exploration are the ways in which bodies, objects, and technologies, from algorithms to uniforms and weapons, shape sensations of (in)security. We are interested in analysing how a sensorial approach that foregrounds sensorial understandings and interpretations provides in-depth analysis of how feelings of (in)security are experienced and translated.

This feature also underlines how anthropology offers a distinctive way to engage with these questions.

Ethnography brings us close to the affective atmospheres and sensory details of security worlds, including the fear, boredom, adrenaline, anticipation, or unease that circulate between people, technologies, and spaces. Thinking of security through sensing thus invites us to move beyond abstract notions of protection or control, and instead to ask how security feels, where it resides, and how it takes shape through the material world around us.

By zooming in on the often-invisible ways in which the sensorial is securitized, the diverse case studies that constitute this collection reveal how political orders and normative frameworks mobilize the senses to maintain control.

Like the scenes we observed in the United States, the essays in this feature trace how the sensory is mobilized to maintain, and sometimes subvert, orders of control across settings as diverse as the US border, Rio de Janeiro’s favelas, Rome’s Roma camps, Mozambique’s political protests, and Denmark’s urban margins.

Through its diverse cases, this feature emphasizes that security is not only a set of practices but a mode of perception. To sense (in)security means to rethink how we study security, and how we feel it as citizens and anthropologists.

Tessa Diphoorn is an Associate Professor at the Department of Cultural Anthropology at Utrecht University, and her research and teaching focus on policing, security, violence, and authority in Kenya and South Africa. She is the author of Twilight Policing. Private Security and Violence in Urban South Africa (University of California Press, 2016), the co-editor of the edited volume, Security Blurs: The Politics of Plural Security Provision (Routledge, 2019), and the co-curator of Nairobi Becoming: Security, Certainty, and Contingency (Punctum Books, 2024).

Tomas Salem is a social anthropologist who completed his PhD research on happiness, environmental ethics, and tourism at the University of Bergen. He is also the author of Policing the Favelas of Rio de Janeiro: Cosmologies of War and The Far-Right (Palgrave 2024). 

Cite as: Diphoorn, T. & Salem, T. 2025. “Sensing (In)Security. New materialism and The Politics of Security” Focaalblog December 22. https://www.focaalblog.com/2025/12/22/tessa-diphoorn-and-tomas-salem-introduction-sensing-insecurity-new-materialism-and-the-politics-of-security/