The Terror Experts: Producing and Policing Terrorist Subjects at a University Research Center
Location
King Building 101
Document Type
Presentation
Start Date
4-27-2018 12:00 PM
End Date
4-27-2018 1:20 PM
Abstract
My research examines the production and circulation of discourses related to (counter)terrorism at a university-affiliated terrorism and security studies research center in eastern Massachusetts. Much of the existing social scientific literature on the relationship between U.S. national counterterror policy and academic research emphasizes a powerful, government-funded nexus of terrorism experts who produce knowledge that legitimizes U.S. imperialism in the name of combatting terror. I analyze ethnographic data gleaned from participant observation, interviews, and media analysis to bring a more nuanced understanding to bear on academic terrorism “experts” and the students they teach. I came to understand these “experts” as relatively peripheral to (trans)national counterterrorism and invested more directly in the consolidation of their own “expertise” than in legitimizing state violence. At the same time, they are embedded in larger economies of knowledge and power that structure the research they produce. I investigate how this research tends to abstract the “terrorist” from structural inequities, producing an imagined figure of the depoliticized radical that serves the interests of both academic regimes of expertise and state regimes of counterterrorism.
Keywords:
counterterrorism, security, academia, expertise, imperialism
Recommended Citation
McLean, Liam, "The Terror Experts: Producing and Policing Terrorist Subjects at a University Research Center" (04/27/18). Senior Symposium. 27.
https://digitalcommons.oberlin.edu/seniorsymp/2018/presentations/27
Major
Anthropology; Creative Writing
Advisor(s)
Erika Hoffman-Dilloway, Anthropology
Sylvia Watanabe, Creative Writing
Project Mentor(s)
Crystal Biruk, Anthropology
April 2018
The Terror Experts: Producing and Policing Terrorist Subjects at a University Research Center
King Building 101
My research examines the production and circulation of discourses related to (counter)terrorism at a university-affiliated terrorism and security studies research center in eastern Massachusetts. Much of the existing social scientific literature on the relationship between U.S. national counterterror policy and academic research emphasizes a powerful, government-funded nexus of terrorism experts who produce knowledge that legitimizes U.S. imperialism in the name of combatting terror. I analyze ethnographic data gleaned from participant observation, interviews, and media analysis to bring a more nuanced understanding to bear on academic terrorism “experts” and the students they teach. I came to understand these “experts” as relatively peripheral to (trans)national counterterrorism and invested more directly in the consolidation of their own “expertise” than in legitimizing state violence. At the same time, they are embedded in larger economies of knowledge and power that structure the research they produce. I investigate how this research tends to abstract the “terrorist” from structural inequities, producing an imagined figure of the depoliticized radical that serves the interests of both academic regimes of expertise and state regimes of counterterrorism.
Notes
Session II, Panel 7 - Politicized | Knowledge
Moderator: Sarah El-Kazaz, Assistant Professor of Politics