Brian Rappert
Biographic Data
| ID | 119240 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Brian Rappert |
| GIVEN NAMES | Brian |
| FAMILY NAME | Rappert |
| SIGNATURE | RAPPERT B |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Exeter |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-6883-531X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 53 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 116 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 50 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 3 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1996 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
(Un)Real matters: Toward the making of fabrication studies
The place of truth in public life has garnered a heightened status in recent times. Considerable efforts are underway in popular and academic forums to shore up true beliefs against their identified counterparts. However, the adequacy of such efforts has been a continuing topic of concern. Such lingering worry points to the intellectual and normative need for sustained programmes of research that offer alternative, but generative, foci and agenda…
Practical points of failure in police-university collaboration: Reconceiving knowledge exchange
Collaborative projects designed to generate research evidence involve knowledge exchange (KE) which hinges on the expectations and practices within the collaborating organisations. Existing literature about academic-police collaborations, and why they break down, has largely focused on different knowledge agendas, research timeframes and organisational cultures. In contrast, we offer a case example that attends to the failures in KE stemming from…
Being Curious with Secrecy
This article contributes to ongoing attempts to broaden out theorizations of secrecy from an intentional and willful act of concealment to a cultural and structural process. We do so by fostering a conversation between secrecy and curiosity. This conversation is enabled through a review of central themes in secrecy studies and curiosity studies, but also through an examination of a collaboration between the science center “We the Curious” and a n…
Evincing Offence: How Digital Forensics Turns Big Data into Evidence for Policing Sexual Abuse
A reader can expect the abstract, paper and keywords to discuss descriptions of evidence, classification schema, seizure rules and more generally the data frictions, constraints and limitations associated with the processing of digital forensic evidence involving children in England. The widespread availability and use of digital devices both enables criminal acts and helps to detect them. The production and circulation of indecent images of chil…
Dirty Work? Policing Online Indecency in Digital Forensics
More than 80 per cent of the work undertaken by digital forensics examiners deals with images of sexual abuse of children. While a growing body of literature analyses the emotional dimensions of coping with such material and the need to minimize exposure to it, less attention has been given to the day-to-day organizational arrangements in which such images are processed. Using ethnographic observations and interviews with practitioners, police of…
Now you see it, now you don't: Methods for Perceiving Intersubjectivity
What work is entailed in learning skills? How do processes of enskillment enable alternative ways of seeing, feeling and acting? How can we intersubjectively meet each other when deception is regarded as prevalent? This article addresses these questions through recounting my experiences associated with learning entertainment magic. I outline how the training of competencies can involve an ongoing problematising of the relationship between seeing …
“Pick a Card, Any Card”: Learning to Deceive and Conceal – with Care
Because of the asymmetries in knowledge regarding the underlying hidden mechanisms as well as because of the importance of intentional deception, entertainment magic is often presented as an exercise in power, manipulation, and control. This article challenges such portrayals and through doing so common presumptions about how secrets are kept. It does so through recounting the experiences of the author as a beginner learning a craft. Regard for t…
Counting the dead and making the dead count: Configuring data and accountability
This article examines the relation between counting, counts and accountability. It does so by comparing the responses of the British government to deaths associated with Covid-19 in 2020 to its responses to deaths associated with the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Similarities and dissimilarities between the cases regarding what counted as data, what data were taken to count, what data counted for, and how data were counted provide the basis for consider…
Rationing bytes: Managing demand for digital forensic examinations
With the growing sophistication and prevalence of digital devices such as mobile phones, computers, tablets, sat-navs, and domestic appliances, the extraction, analysis and interpretation of digital data has become increasingly central to intelligence gathering and criminal proceedings. However, the very extent of data available today challenges the ability of police agencies to turn seized devices into useful evidence. To date, most social scien…
Making sense of evidence: Using research training to promote organisational change
Many have argued that the development of evidence-based policing (EBP) depends on those in law enforcement agencies receiving appropriate training in research methodologies and data analysis. Despite this, there are few detailed accounts of such training and its delivery. This paper describes and evaluates the contribution of training workshops for police officers and staff in driving forward EBP. The workshops, developed based on a model used in…
Leaky Revelations: Commitments in Exposing Militarism
This is the final version. Available from University of Chicago Press via the DOI in this record
Contested Futures: A Sociology of Prospective Techno-Science
In a unique volume, Contested Futures brings together a group of scholars to examine the relationships between social action and the future. Rather than speculating upon what the future might bring, the volume interrogates the metaphors and practices through which the future is mobilized as an object of present day action and agency. The book shifts the analytical gaze from looking into the future to looking at the future as a sociological phenom…
Data Shadows: Knowledge, Openness, and Absence
This editorial critically engages with the understanding of openness by attending to how notions of presence and absence come bundled together as part of efforts to make open. This is particularly evident in contemporary discourse around data production, dissemination, and use. We highlight how the preoccupations with making data present can be usefully analyzed and understood by tracing the related concerns around what is missing, unavailable, o…
Is Not Much To You’: Open Science and neglected accessibilities for scientific research in Africa
The Open Science (OS) movement promises nothing less than a revolution in the availability of scientific knowledge around the globe. By removing barriers to online data and encouraging publication in Open Access formats and Open Data archives, OS seeks to expand the role, reach and value of research. The promises of OS imply a set of expectations about what different publics hope to gain from research, how accountability and participation can be …
Data sharing in low-resourced research environments
‘Open data’ has recently emerged as a label for renewed attempts to promote scientific exchange. As part of such efforts, the posting of data online is often portrayed as commonly beneficial: individual scientists accrue greater prominence while at the same time fostering communal knowledge. Yet, how scientists in non-Western research settings assess such calls for openness has been the subject of little empirical study. Based on extended fieldwo…
Ignorance is strength?
This chapter discusses the challenge of knowing about what is purposefully rendered difficult to know about matters of defense, intelligence and security. In the light of this challenge, the chapter seeks to develop an appreciation of how commentators across varied disciplines characterize the relation between knowledge and ignorance in matters associated with intelligence, security and national secrecy. It explores how ignorance can become a res…
Absence in Science, Security and Policy: From Research Agendas to Global Strategy
This book explores the absent and missing in debates about science and security. Through varied case studies, including biological and chemical weapons control, science journalism, nanotechnology rese
Sensing Absence: How to See What Isn’t There in the Study of Science and Security
Chapter 1 of this book is open access under a CC BY license. This is a chapter from Absence in Science, Security and Policy edited by Brian Rappert and Brian Balmer. This chapter is available open acc
On conveying and not conveying expertise
This article attends to the movement between disclosing and non-disclosing in accounts of expertise. While referencing discussions about tacit knowledge ('experts know more than they can say') and the politics of non-disclosure ('withholding can help as well as harm the credibility of experts'), in the main it considers how experts move between conveying and not conveying in order to make their proficiencies recognized and accessible to others. T…
Introducing Absence
The roles of civil society in the development of standards around new weapons and other technologies of warfare
This article considers the role of civil society in the development of new standards around weapons. The broad but informal roles that civil society has undertaken are contrasted with the relatively narrow review mechanisms adopted by states in fulfilment of their legal obligations. Such review mechanisms are also considered in the context of wider thinking about processes by which society considers new technologies that may be adopted into the p…
The case for addressing explosive weapons: Conflict, violence and health
States of ignorance: The Unmaking and Remaking of Death Tolls
This paper considers the complications and tensions associated with knowing about ignorance. In particular it attends to how the social analysis of ignorance hazards being associated with the production and magnification of ignorance. It does so through questioning how the UK government contended that the number of civilian deaths stemming from the 2003 Iraq invasion could not ‘reliably’ be known. The twists and turns of official public statement…
Deadly metal rain: The legality of flechette weapons in international law
Deadly metal rain: the legality of flechette weapons in international law, by Eitan Barak, Leiden, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 2011, 320pp., €121, ISBN 978-9004-16719-3 Recent decades have offered
Evidencing similarity: The language of judgement, spin, and accountability
Accusations that some purposefully manipulate information in order to create a favourable impression in others are commonplace in political life. The term ‘spin’ has emerged in recent decades as a versatile but ill-defined normative charge that signifies a lost fidelity. This article examines a prominent attempt to adjudicate on allegations of it in order to ask how such debates are collaboratively produced and sustained. The case study is the ‘B…
States of ignorance: The Unmaking and Remaking of Death Tolls
This paper considers the complications and tensions associated with knowing about ignorance. In particular it attends to how the social analysis of ignorance hazards being associated with the production and magnification of ignorance. It does so through questioning how the UK government contended that the number of civilian deaths stemming from the 2003 Iraq invasion could not ‘reliably’ be known. The twists and turns of official public statement…
Technologies, Texts and Possibilities: A Reply to Hutchby
Data Shadows: Knowledge, Openness, and Absence
This editorial critically engages with the understanding of openness by attending to how notions of presence and absence come bundled together as part of efforts to make open. This is particularly evident in contemporary discourse around data production, dissemination, and use. We highlight how the preoccupations with making data present can be usefully analyzed and understood by tracing the related concerns around what is missing, unavailable, o…
Revealing and concealing secrets in research: The Potential for the Absent
Qualitative research accounts are characterized by absences; absences resulting from what can not be told because it is not known and from what can not be repeated because it should not be stated. This article examines the problems associated with undertaking research in conditions of secrecy in order to ask how the missing could figure as a creative resource in our accounts of the social world. It advances an overall strategy of exemplifying the…
Contested Futures: A Sociology of Prospective Techno-Science
In a unique volume, Contested Futures brings together a group of scholars to examine the relationships between social action and the future. Rather than speculating upon what the future might bring, the volume interrogates the metaphors and practices through which the future is mobilized as an object of present day action and agency. The book shifts the analytical gaze from looking into the future to looking at the future as a sociological phenom…
Introducing Absence
Rationalising the future? Foresight in science and technology policy co-ordination
The roles of civil society in the development of standards around new weapons and other technologies of warfare
This article considers the role of civil society in the development of new standards around weapons. The broad but informal roles that civil society has undertaken are contrasted with the relatively narrow review mechanisms adopted by states in fulfilment of their legal obligations. Such review mechanisms are also considered in the context of wider thinking about processes by which society considers new technologies that may be adopted into the p…
Prohibitions, Weapons and Controversy: Managing the Problems of Ordering
With the destructiveness of modern conflict, varied national and international calls have been made to constrain the employment of weaponry. Efforts to establish prohibition regimes attempt to cut through disorderly and diverse sociotechnical assemblages to locate the principal source of a problem in order to justify a certain course of action. Science and Technology Studies cautions against separating elements of socio-technical assemblages. Lik…
The case for addressing explosive weapons: Conflict, violence and health
Counting the dead and making the dead count: Configuring data and accountability
This article examines the relation between counting, counts and accountability. It does so by comparing the responses of the British government to deaths associated with Covid-19 in 2020 to its responses to deaths associated with the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Similarities and dissimilarities between the cases regarding what counted as data, what data were taken to count, what data counted for, and how data were counted provide the basis for consider…
Rationing bytes: Managing demand for digital forensic examinations
With the growing sophistication and prevalence of digital devices such as mobile phones, computers, tablets, sat-navs, and domestic appliances, the extraction, analysis and interpretation of digital data has become increasingly central to intelligence gathering and criminal proceedings. However, the very extent of data available today challenges the ability of police agencies to turn seized devices into useful evidence. To date, most social scien…
Making Silence Matter: The Place of the Absences in Ethnography
Professional and organizational attention in recent years to what ethnographers can and cannot disclose as part of their research accounts has extended the range and relevance of concerns pertaining to the relation between investigators and those they study. When researchers are working under conditions characterised by secrecy and a limited access to information, then the difficulties faced in offering accounts are all the more acute. This prese…
Constructions of Legitimate Force. The Case of CS Sprays
The use of force by the police is an area of significant concern both within and outside the police. The police struggle to find effective but publicly acceptable options. Recently in the United Kingdom, the deployment of CS chemical incapacitant sprays has emerged as a key initiative in the protection of officers and the enforcement of the law. Yet, the sprays have proved controversial. Reflecting debates within criminology about the contributio…
The Uses of Relevance: Thoughts on a Reflexive Sociology
`Relevance', `accountability' and `users' are now prominent terms in the policies of public research funding agencies. In countries such as the UK, the funding of research in social science and other subjects has become increasingly dependent on the perception that research will contribute towards the achievement of certain national goals. Despite renewed discussions surrounding the utility of social analysis, these are rarely informed by debates…
Dirty Work? Policing Online Indecency in Digital Forensics
More than 80 per cent of the work undertaken by digital forensics examiners deals with images of sexual abuse of children. While a growing body of literature analyses the emotional dimensions of coping with such material and the need to minimize exposure to it, less attention has been given to the day-to-day organizational arrangements in which such images are processed. Using ethnographic observations and interviews with practitioners, police of…
Leaky Revelations: Commitments in Exposing Militarism
This is the final version. Available from University of Chicago Press via the DOI in this record
On the Mid Range: An Exercise in Disposing (or Minding the Gaps)
Many efforts to establish concepts and theories of the middle range have sought to find an appropriate balance between theoretical abstraction and the desire to remain faithful to the empirical complexity of phenomenon. As with other forms of expertise, those analyzing socio-technical life face acute tensions in attempting to reconcile the general and the specific in a manner which is regarded as credible. Through a consideration of the self-refe…
Moralizing Violence: Debating the acceptability of electrical weapons
Health and safety in policing: Lessons from the regulation of CS sprays in the UK
Assessing Technologies of Political Control
In recent years, governments around the world have spent significant amounts of money researching, developing and deploying new technology for their security forces. This article seeks to further the understanding of these so-called `technologies of political control', by exploring three questions: How can we understand the consequences of this technology? What kind of knowledge is important in assessing them? What strategies could form a basis f…
Users and Social Science Research: Policy, Problems and Possibilities
Recent times have seen a significant reorientation in public funding for academic research across many countries. Public bodies in the UK have been at the forefront of such activities, typically justified in terms of a need to meet the challenges of international competitiveness and improve quality of life. One set of mechanisms advanced for further achieving these goals is the incorporation of users' needs into various aspects of the research pr…
Patenting politics: US initiatives for hegemony in biotechnology
Users and Social Science Research: Policy, Problems and Possibilities
Recent times have seen a significant reorientation in public funding for academic research across many countries. Public bodies in the UK have been at the forefront of such activities, typically justified in terms of a need to meet the challenges of international competitiveness and improve quality of life. One set of mechanisms advanced for further achieving these goals is the incorporation of users' needs into various aspects of the research pr…
Rationalising the future? Foresight in science and technology policy co-ordination
Assessing Technologies of Political Control
In recent years, governments around the world have spent significant amounts of money researching, developing and deploying new technology for their security forces. This article seeks to further the understanding of these so-called `technologies of political control', by exploring three questions: How can we understand the consequences of this technology? What kind of knowledge is important in assessing them? What strategies could form a basis f…
The Uses of Relevance: Thoughts on a Reflexive Sociology
`Relevance', `accountability' and `users' are now prominent terms in the policies of public research funding agencies. In countries such as the UK, the funding of research in social science and other subjects has become increasingly dependent on the perception that research will contribute towards the achievement of certain national goals. Despite renewed discussions surrounding the utility of social analysis, these are rarely informed by debates…
Putting the future in its place: Comparing innovation moments in genetic diagnostics and telemedicine
Health care professionals today struggle to establish strategic directions for the future, in part because of the continuing uncertainties engendered by innovations in the diagnosis and treatment of disease. Emerging technologies such as genetics and information technology pose acute challenges for healthcare professionals in respect to questions of service provision, organizational change and the meaning of health and illness. This paper contras…
Emerging Bioinformatic Networks: Contesting the Public Meaning of Private and the Private Meaning of Public
This paper explores the complexity of public/private identities in the emerging global economies of gene sequence mapping and analysis. In so doing we seek to offer a less over-determined acccount of what it means to describe institutional actors as either 'public' or 'private'. Instead, these 'codes' can be seen to offer actors a means of mutual positioning that, more usually conceals broader interdependencies within the world's bioinformatics n…
The Distribution and Resolution of the Ambiguities of Technology, or Why Bobby Can't Spray
Much debate has taken place in science and technology studies (S&TS) regarding how to speak about the capacities of technology. Alternative approaches are bound up with questions over the merits of realist and relativist accounts of technology and their potential for analytical insight and practical engagement. This paper advances a basis for examining the link between politics and artefacts, one that draws on but reconfigures the work of post-es…
Scenarios on the future of non-lethal weapons
Toward an Understanding of Nonlethality
In recent times, growing attention has been given to the possible role “nonlethal” technology might play in helping to resolve contemporary security challenges. The concept of nonlethality offers the possibility of reducing suffering through the application of weapons designed and intended to minimize unnecessary harmful effects. Despite this promise and the accompanying expansion of literature on nonlethal weapons, there are basic disagreements …
Books Reviewed
Constructions of Legitimate Force. The Case of CS Sprays
The use of force by the police is an area of significant concern both within and outside the police. The police struggle to find effective but publicly acceptable options. Recently in the United Kingdom, the deployment of CS chemical incapacitant sprays has emerged as a key initiative in the protection of officers and the enforcement of the law. Yet, the sprays have proved controversial. Reflecting debates within criminology about the contributio…
Biological weapons, genetics and social analysis: Emerging responses, emerging issues--I
Recent terrorist attacks in the USA have generated significant attention in many countries to the threats posed by biological weapons. In response to these events and the spectre of future attacks, bioscientists and professional organizations have begun or intensified asking questions about the possible malign applications of their research. As Part I of a two-part article, this paper surveys how genetics might contribute to the development of no…
Biological weapons, genetics, and social analysis: Emerging responses, emerging issues—II
Recent terrorist attacks in the USA have generated significant attention in many countries to the threats posed by biological weapons. In response to these events and the spectre of future attacks, bioscientists and professional organizations have begun or intensified asking questions about the possible malign applications of their research. As Part I of a two-part article, this paper surveys how genetics might contribute to the development of no…
Biological weapons, genetics and social analysis: Emerging responses, emerging issues—I
Recent terrorist attacks in the USA have generated significant attention in many countries to the threats posed by biological weapons. In response to these events and the spectre of future attacks, bioscientists and professional organizations have begun or intensified asking questions about the possible malign applications of their research. As Part I of a two-part article, this paper surveys how genetics might contribute to the development of no…
Non-lethal Weapons as Legitimizing Forces: Technology, Politics and the Management of Conflict
Health and safety in policing: Lessons from the regulation of CS sprays in the UK
Technologies, Texts and Possibilities: A Reply to Hutchby
A framework for the assessment of non-lethal weapons
In many government, police and military circles, attention is being given to so-called 'non-lethal' weapons as means of reducing many of the negative effects directly or indirectly associated with the use of force. Despite the purported ability of the adoption of such weaponry to lessen grounds for contention and concern, past experience suggests the need for scepticism regarding the purported benefits. Rather than relying on poorly substantiated…
Moralizing Violence: Debating the acceptability of electrical weapons
Prohibitions, Weapons and Controversy: Managing the Problems of Ordering
With the destructiveness of modern conflict, varied national and international calls have been made to constrain the employment of weaponry. Efforts to establish prohibition regimes attempt to cut through disorderly and diverse sociotechnical assemblages to locate the principal source of a problem in order to justify a certain course of action. Science and Technology Studies cautions against separating elements of socio-technical assemblages. Lik…
Technology and Security
This book takes forward the existing state of academic understanding where security and technology intersect. It assesses the challenges posed by emerging scientific and technological developments for
Technology and Security: Governing Threats in the New Millennium
On the Mid Range: An Exercise in Disposing (or Minding the Gaps)
Many efforts to establish concepts and theories of the middle range have sought to find an appropriate balance between theoretical abstraction and the desire to remain faithful to the empirical complexity of phenomenon. As with other forms of expertise, those analyzing socio-technical life face acute tensions in attempting to reconcile the general and the specific in a manner which is regarded as credible. Through a consideration of the self-refe…
Biosecurity: Origins, Transformations and Practices
This book explores the origins, interpretations and meanings of the term 'biosecurity'. It brings together contributors on issues relating to the perceptions of the threat of biological weapons and ho
Political science (42 works) · Sociology (38 works) · Computer Science (26 works) · Law (25 works) · Epistemology (22 works) · Public relations (19 works) · Psychology (18 works) · Law (17 works) · Computer security (12 works) · Engineering (12 works)