Suchergebnisse

Chemical warfare in World War I -- War gases for peacetime use -- Tear gas and the benevolent empire -- Tear gas and the rise of modern riot control -- The science of making CS gas "safe" -- Policing with poison -- Profiting from police use of force -- From resilience to resistance

Introduction -- Infrastructures and practices of protest camping -- Media and communication infrastructures -- Protest action infrastructures -- Governance infrastructures -- Re-creation infrastructures -- Alternative worlds

By the 1990s the dynamic array of creative direct action tactics used against militarised technologies that emerged from women's anti-nuclear protest camps in the 1980s became largely eclipsed by cyberfeminism's focus on digital and online technologies. Yet recently, as robots and algorithms are put forward as the vanguards of new drone execution regimes, some are wondering if now is the time for another Greenham Common. In this article I return to cyborg feminism and anti-nuclear activisms of the 1980s to explore what drone feminism might look like today. I examine how anti-nuclear protesters infused affect and techné, creating innovative images of, and tactics for, material resistance. I argue that Greenham women's cyborg feminisms arose from their material entanglements with the military base. In their efforts to reveal and undermine the national and imperial myths upon which warfare is based, protesters re-imagined technological possibilities based upon a global accountability for 'earthly survival'.

Tear gas, first used in World War One, is increasingly becoming the weapon of choice for security forces across the globe. Anna Feigenbaum offers a bleak picture of how companies - with a particular focus on Condor in Brazil - are capitalising on this trend and reaping financial benefits by marketing it as a "non-lethal" weapon. She demonstrates how in reality categorising tear gas as "non-lethal" is at best misguided and at worst disingenuous. Feigenbaum sets out the historical reasons for this "non-lethal" categorisation of tear gas - ones which governments and big business are happy to rely on today despite the ever increasing body of evidence that shows the extreme human rights abuses that its use inflicts on civilian populations worldwide.

ABSTRACT
While much is written on government, legal and media discourses of security and counter-terrorism, very few studies turn a critical eye towards 'mediation' as it applies to the marketing of counter-terrorism technologies. Counter-terrorism technologies include everything from surveillance cameras to biometric scanners, data protection software to perimeter-security fencing. Together they comprise one of the largest, most profitable product sectors in the global economy. In this article I look at the visual corporate communication strategies used to market counter-terrorism technologies to both governments and the private sector. I use a dual method approach to perform this investigation. First, I conduct a visual analysis of promotional material produced by counter-terrorism technology manufacturers including product brochures and advertisements in defence magazines. Second, I draw from participant-observation research carried out over the past three years at counter-terrorism expos. This research offers insight into how discourses around security and counter-terrorism are shaped not only through government and military PR (as it is often spread through the mass media), but also by defence technology manufacturers and marketers ranging from major security conglomerates such as Group4Securicor and Magal Security Systems, to telecommunication giants including AT&T and IBM.

In this article, we analyse changes in the circulation of advertisements of policing products at security expos between 1995 and 2013. While the initial aim of the research was to evidence shifts in terrorist frames in the marketing of policing equipment before and after 9/11, our findings instead suggested that what we are seeing is the rise of marketing to police as "vulnerable warriors", law enforcement officers in need of military weapons both for their offensive capabilities and for the protection they can offer to a police force that is always under threat.

The COVID-19 pandemic has called for effective health communication strategies to better protect the public's well-being, particularly over social media. Among various strategies, health-related comics, referred to as 'graphic medicine', were circulated on social media to communicate public health information and to share individuals' struggles with mental health. Despite a growing body of research in the field of graphic medicine, studies on public responses to graphic medicine are rare, leaving a gap in understanding the feasibility of these comics for effective health communication over social media. To address this gap, this study focused on Instagram audience responses to graphic medicine posts related to the COVID-19 pandemic that were circulated on the platform. It used qualitative content analysis to study 334 comments on eleven comics related to mental health and 159 comments on ten comics related to vaccination. Findings evidence the feasibility of graphic medicine as a tool for health communication relating to showing empathy, contributing personal experiences and knowledge and understanding and elaborating on health-related knowledge, what we refer to as 'health literacy'. Empirical implications of health communication through graphic medicine are discussed alongside the similarities and differences found in the comments relating to these two distinct COVID-19 issues.

Recently protest camps have emerged around the world as a highly visible form of protest. Part and parcel of new social movement activism for over 40 years, they are important sites and catalysts for identity creation, expression, political contention and incubators for social change. While research has punctually addressed individual camps, there is lack of comparative and comprehensive research that links historic and contemporary protest camps as a unique area of interdisciplinary study. Research on the phenomenon to date has remained punctual and case based. This paper proposes to study protest camps as a distinct new field of research in social movement studies. Existing literature is critically reviewed and framed in three thematic clusters of spatiality, affect and autonomy. On the basis of this review the paper develops a research approach based on the analysis of infrastructures used to make protest camps. We contest that an infrastructural analysis highlights protest camps as a unique organizational form and transcends the limits of case-based research while respecting the varying contexts and trajectories of protest camps.