Limor Samimian-Darash
Biographic Data
| ID | 908358 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Limor Samimian-Darash |
| GIVEN NAMES | Limor |
| FAMILY NAME | Samimian-Darash |
| SIGNATURE | SAMIMIAN-DARASH L |
| AFFILIATIONS | Hebrew University of Jerusalem |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2659-5829 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 29 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 228 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 29 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2009 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
Temporalities of future governance: Modern and contemporary modalities in energy scenarios
In this article, we characterize two modalities of future governance by analyzing how scenarios are used in the energy sector. We argue that these modalities are underpinned by different temporalities: a linear temporality, where the present is a consequence both of the past and of present decisions that shape the future (in the modern modality), and a non-linear temporality, where the coexisting present and future emerge simultaneously (in the c…
Simulation exercises, scenarios, and preparedness in global health governance after Covid-19
This article focuses on preparedness for the future in global health governance and explores a possible trajectory of development in this regard. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research on simulations and scenarios in global health, it specifically examines the World Health Organisation’s (WHO) longstanding work with simulation exercises and relatively recent engagement with scenarios during the COVID-19 pandemic. Based on a detailed analysis …
Situational awareness across different temporalities: Scenario Exercises for Health, Security and Energy Futures
This article looks at the concept of situational awareness in the context of scenario planning. It draws on three cases in which scenarios are used – scenario-based Turning Point exercises in Israel, which focus on security and emergency situations; health scenarios and simulations conducted by the World Health Organization's Regional Office for Europe; and energy scenarios in the World Energy Council – and examines the different ways in which si…
The contemporary (re-)configuration of global health governance: Reevaluating health politics in the Covid-19 pandemic
The COVID-19 pandemic has raised probing questions about the politics that underly health governance. This article engages with recent sociological and political analyses in this regard and offers a reconsideration of what the pandemic represents for global health governance: a moment of reconfiguration rather than continuity or fundamental change. Drawing on Paul Rabinow's notion of 'the contemporary' as a mode of analysis, we conceptualise glob…
Unboxing the imaginary: Typology of future imagination techniques in high-tech development
When the future is connected to the term ‘imagination’, it is generally presented through the concept of the ‘imaginary’—that is, an image of the future that is related to a grand social image. In this article, we discuss the concept of sociotechnical imaginaries and argue that although this concept provides a needed perspective that allows scholars to unpack imaginaries associated with technological futures, it often features very broad concepts…
Cutting at the edge: Observations on Innovation Beyond the Urban
Innovation is generally associated with the creation of something new and with economic growth, and is often understood in relation to modernity and its prime social site, 'the city'. Accordingly, the coupling of innovation and rural areas may seem incongruent. Drawing on ethnographic research on Israel's high-tech scene, we analyse innovation centres located primarily in kibbutzim in the northern and southern regions of the country. This allows …
Encountering future uncertainties through scenario technology
As a social technology, the scenario differs from other techniques usually associated with managing future uncertainties. These draw mainly on the construct of risk and the related notion of risk management - that is, calculation and evaluation based on knowledge of past events, leading to possible control, prevention or prediction of unknowable futures. Scenarios create stories of the future neither to translate them into assessed possibilities …
Uncertainty by Design: Preparing for the Future with Scenario Technology
This book presents cases of the use of scenario technology in the fields of security and emergency preparedness, energy, and health by analyzing scenario narratives and practices at the National Emergency Management Authority in Israel, the World Health Organization's Regional Office for Europe, and the World Energy Council. Humankind has long struggled with the uncertainty of the future, with how to foresee the future, imagine alternatives, or p…
Scenarios in a Time of Urgency: Shifting Temporality and Technology
This article explores the connection between technology and temporality, and discusses specifically scenario technology and the temporality of urgency, in the context of the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. It illustrates how, despite the inherent orientation toward the future potentiality in this technology, once an actual event occurs and the temporality of preparedness is overridden by a temporality of urgency, the scenario techno…
Governing the future through scenaristic and simulative modalities of imagination
In this article, I examine several expressions of imaginative practices to unpack the umbrella term scenario. Drawing on my long-term fieldwork on Israel's annual Turning Point exercises, I examine actual uses of scenarios and distinguish between two different logics of imaginative practices and the modalities in which the future is governed by them, which I refer to as the scenaristic and the simulative. As I demonstrate, these two modalities ca…
Encapsulation: Governing actual uncertainty in the coronavirus pandemic
The coronavirus pandemic has revived scholarly engagement with the concept of biopolitics, with interpretations diagnosing either the widespread adoption of a classic biopolitical regime or the full-blown emergence of totalitarian repression (or both of these simultaneously). Relying on a close analysis of different interventions taken by Israeli authorities in response to the pandemic, this article argues that, rather than classic biopolitical s…
Governing uncertainty, producing subjectivity: From Mode I to Mode II scenarios
An emergency of circulation: Entry screening in the UK during the 2014 Ebola epidemic
The rise of emergency governance in global public health has driven a number of changes in this field. In this article, we investigate one of the practices of emergency governance – border screening – and identify a new form of screening that emerged in the UK during the 2014 Ebola epidemic in West Africa. Analysing the UK’s deployment of Ebola entry screening and the public debate that emerged around it, we show how this technology was construct…
Humanitarian Aid, Security and Ethics
The article examines the relationship between humanitarianism, security, and ethics in the case of the provision of medical humanitarian aid by Israel to casualties from the Syrian civil war, between 2013 and 2018. We argue that this humanitarian project differs from the type of humanitarian intervention commonly seen in conflict zones and can be identified as a new form of humanitarian governance. Our case study deals with humanitarian care prov…
Unintended Securitization
In this article, we examine statements by state officials and individuals from the military and the medical establishment regarding the provision of medical aid by Israel to casualties from the Syrian Civil War. We argue discussions of this project have been characterized by three different discourses, each dominant at different times, which we classify as military, medical, and political-security. We propose “unintended securitization” to descri…
Emergency, preparedness, and UK global health policy following the 2014 West African Ebola epidemic
In this article, we analyze UK global health policy in the light of the 2014 Ebola epidemic. Specifically, we focus on the UK government’s intervention in the epidemic, reflections on the UK’s response in parliamentary committees and government-sponsored forums, and subsequent UK global health policy changes. Post-Ebola, we argue, UK global health policy turned into a pursuit of global health emergency-preparedness through development. This, we f…
From Crisis to Emergency: The Shifting Logic of Preparedness
Following the Second Lebanon War (2006), Israeli preparedness exercises were designed in reference to that crisis event. Hold annually for more than a decade, 'Turning Point' exercises are now accompanied by a 'National Emergency Week'. After three years of fieldwork in the National Emergency Management Authority (NEMA) and the Turning Point administration, we came to realise that the conceptualisation of preparedness for such events has morphed.…
Unprepared: Global Health in a Time of Emergency by Andrew Lakoff
Reviewed by: Unprepared: Global Health in a Time of Emergency by Andrew Lakoff Limor Samimian-Darash Andrew Lakoff. Unprepared: Global Health in a Time of Emergency. Oakland: University of California Press, 2017. 240 pp. $29.95. (978–0–52029–576–6). This book joins the recent literature that examines future intervention technologies and identifies a new modality of securing against “future threats” that goes beyond Foucauldian biopolitical securi…
Anthropology of security and security in anthropology: Cases of counterterrorism in the United States
In this article we propose a mode of analysis that allows us to consider security as a form distinct from insecurity, in order to capture the heterogeneity of security objects, logics and forms of action. We first develop a genealogy for the anthropology of security, demarcating four main approaches: violence and state terror; military, militarization, and militarism; para-state securitization; and what we submit as 'security assemblages.' Securi…
Biosecurity as a boundary object: Science, society, and the state
Biosecurity is a concern in many parts of the world but is differently conceived and addressed depending on context. This article draws on two cases concerned with life sciences research involving dangerous pathogens, one in the United States and one in Israel, to examine this variability. In both cases, concern revolves around issues of biosafety and bioterrorism, which are targeted by similar policies and solutions. The cases, nevertheless, dif…
Practicing Uncertainty: Scenario-Based Preparedness Exercises in Israel
In this article, I analyze how the Turning Point scenario-based exercise works as a technology-based uncertainty, both in its conceptualization of the future and in its enactment. The Israeli preparedness exercise involves the activation of and reaction to a chosen event, one that does not replicate the past or attempt to predict the future. Though designed to challenge responders, the scenario does not represent a worst-case event but a plausibl…
Introduction by Limor Samimian-Darash and Paul Rabinow
Examining how insurance has been imagined and practiced in various historical configurations of liberal governance, this chapter explores the diverse ways in which security, uncertainty, and freedom change their meanings quite radically. Nineteenth century liberalism emphasized individual foresight as a technique for governing uncertainties (such as the free market) that were imagined to be essential to freedom. Around the turn of the 20th centur…
Modes of Uncertainty: Anthropological Cases
Modes of Uncertainty offers groundbreaking ways of thinking about danger, risk, and uncertainty from an analytical and anthropological perspective. Our world, the contributors show, is increasingly populated by forms, practices, and events whose uncertainty cannot be reduced to risk - and thus it is vital to distinguish between the two. Drawing the lines between them, they argue that the study of uncertainty should not focus solely on the appeara…
Governing Heterogeneous Populations: Separate and Unequal' in Israel
Drawing on the Israeli 'Immanuel Affair' (also called the 'Israeli Brown Affair'), we examine the complex relationship between governmentality and population compositions. In the town of Immanuel, the State attempted to establish a homogeneous population of ultra-orthodox Jews by opening it to unrestricted settlement. Rather than homogeneity however, this strategy produced a divided community, whose Ashkenazi and Mizrahi residents barely interact…
Rebuilding the body through violence and control
In this article, I examine the bodily changes that soldiers undergo in an intensive counter-terrorism military training course. I argue that military draftees develop control and violent capabilities through Violent Reflexive Bodily Practices (VRBPs), a concept I introduce here. VRBPs, which form the core of training in this elite military unit, are simultaneously recursive, reflexive and reconstructive: they are expressed by the soldier's body a…
Governing Future Potential Biothreats: Toward an Anthropology of Uncertainty
Through analysis of preparedness for pandemic influenza in Israel, I explore how future uncertainty is conceptualized and the various practices put into action to deal with it. In particular, I discuss the emergence of a new type of uncertainty-potential uncertainty-and three technologies employed to cope with it: risk technology, preparedness technology, and event technology. Event technology emerges in the preparations for a potential uncertain…
Modes of Uncertainty: Anthropological Cases
Modes of Uncertainty offers groundbreaking ways of thinking about danger, risk, and uncertainty from an analytical and anthropological perspective. Our world, the contributors show, is increasingly populated by forms, practices, and events whose uncertainty cannot be reduced to risk - and thus it is vital to distinguish between the two. Drawing the lines between them, they argue that the study of uncertainty should not focus solely on the appeara…
A pre-event configuration for biological threats: Preparedness and the constitution of biosecurity events
Drawing on an inquiry into Israel's preparedness for biological threats, in this article I suggest a new analysis of biosecurity events. A complex and dynamic assemblage emerges to prepare for biological threats, one that I call a "pre-event configuration." The assemblage is composed of three core elements-the scientific element, the security element, and the public health element-each of which diagnoses threats and suggests appropriate solutions…
Practicing Uncertainty: Scenario-Based Preparedness Exercises in Israel
In this article, I analyze how the Turning Point scenario-based exercise works as a technology-based uncertainty, both in its conceptualization of the future and in its enactment. The Israeli preparedness exercise involves the activation of and reaction to a chosen event, one that does not replicate the past or attempt to predict the future. Though designed to challenge responders, the scenario does not represent a worst-case event but a plausibl…
Anthropology of security and security in anthropology: Cases of counterterrorism in the United States
In this article we propose a mode of analysis that allows us to consider security as a form distinct from insecurity, in order to capture the heterogeneity of security objects, logics and forms of action. We first develop a genealogy for the anthropology of security, demarcating four main approaches: violence and state terror; military, militarization, and militarism; para-state securitization; and what we submit as 'security assemblages.' Securi…
From Crisis to Emergency: The Shifting Logic of Preparedness
Following the Second Lebanon War (2006), Israeli preparedness exercises were designed in reference to that crisis event. Hold annually for more than a decade, 'Turning Point' exercises are now accompanied by a 'National Emergency Week'. After three years of fieldwork in the National Emergency Management Authority (NEMA) and the Turning Point administration, we came to realise that the conceptualisation of preparedness for such events has morphed.…
Rebuilding the body through violence and control
In this article, I examine the bodily changes that soldiers undergo in an intensive counter-terrorism military training course. I argue that military draftees develop control and violent capabilities through Violent Reflexive Bodily Practices (VRBPs), a concept I introduce here. VRBPs, which form the core of training in this elite military unit, are simultaneously recursive, reflexive and reconstructive: they are expressed by the soldier's body a…
The re-forming state: Actions and repercussions in preparing for future biological events
The article analyzes the heterogeneous forms of action within the state's preparedness assemblage for biological threats in Israel. By examining preparedness practices in two biological preparedness events - the smallpox vaccination project (a possible event) and the ongoing preparations for pandemic influenza (a virtual event) - the analysis maintains that there are a number of simultaneous state practices that emerge in response to various even…
Governing the future through scenaristic and simulative modalities of imagination
In this article, I examine several expressions of imaginative practices to unpack the umbrella term scenario. Drawing on my long-term fieldwork on Israel's annual Turning Point exercises, I examine actual uses of scenarios and distinguish between two different logics of imaginative practices and the modalities in which the future is governed by them, which I refer to as the scenaristic and the simulative. As I demonstrate, these two modalities ca…
Governing through time: Preparing for Future Threats to Health and Security
During preparations for the Second Gulf War, Israel considered universal smallpox vaccination. In doing so, it faced a problem: how to legitimise carrying out a security action against an uncertain future danger (smallpox pandemic), when this action carried specific, known risks (vaccine complications). To solve this problem, the Israeli preparedness system created a new domain through which the security action could reach its goal with minimum r…
Biosecurity as a boundary object: Science, society, and the state
Biosecurity is a concern in many parts of the world but is differently conceived and addressed depending on context. This article draws on two cases concerned with life sciences research involving dangerous pathogens, one in the United States and one in Israel, to examine this variability. In both cases, concern revolves around issues of biosafety and bioterrorism, which are targeted by similar policies and solutions. The cases, nevertheless, dif…
Scenarios in a Time of Urgency: Shifting Temporality and Technology
This article explores the connection between technology and temporality, and discusses specifically scenario technology and the temporality of urgency, in the context of the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. It illustrates how, despite the inherent orientation toward the future potentiality in this technology, once an actual event occurs and the temporality of preparedness is overridden by a temporality of urgency, the scenario techno…
Unboxing the imaginary: Typology of future imagination techniques in high-tech development
When the future is connected to the term ‘imagination’, it is generally presented through the concept of the ‘imaginary’—that is, an image of the future that is related to a grand social image. In this article, we discuss the concept of sociotechnical imaginaries and argue that although this concept provides a needed perspective that allows scholars to unpack imaginaries associated with technological futures, it often features very broad concepts…
Situational awareness across different temporalities: Scenario Exercises for Health, Security and Energy Futures
This article looks at the concept of situational awareness in the context of scenario planning. It draws on three cases in which scenarios are used – scenario-based Turning Point exercises in Israel, which focus on security and emergency situations; health scenarios and simulations conducted by the World Health Organization's Regional Office for Europe; and energy scenarios in the World Energy Council – and examines the different ways in which si…
Encountering future uncertainties through scenario technology
As a social technology, the scenario differs from other techniques usually associated with managing future uncertainties. These draw mainly on the construct of risk and the related notion of risk management - that is, calculation and evaluation based on knowledge of past events, leading to possible control, prevention or prediction of unknowable futures. Scenarios create stories of the future neither to translate them into assessed possibilities …
Encapsulation: Governing actual uncertainty in the coronavirus pandemic
The coronavirus pandemic has revived scholarly engagement with the concept of biopolitics, with interpretations diagnosing either the widespread adoption of a classic biopolitical regime or the full-blown emergence of totalitarian repression (or both of these simultaneously). Relying on a close analysis of different interventions taken by Israeli authorities in response to the pandemic, this article argues that, rather than classic biopolitical s…
Governing Heterogeneous Populations: Separate and Unequal' in Israel
Drawing on the Israeli 'Immanuel Affair' (also called the 'Israeli Brown Affair'), we examine the complex relationship between governmentality and population compositions. In the town of Immanuel, the State attempted to establish a homogeneous population of ultra-orthodox Jews by opening it to unrestricted settlement. Rather than homogeneity however, this strategy produced a divided community, whose Ashkenazi and Mizrahi residents barely interact…
A pre-event configuration for biological threats: Preparedness and the constitution of biosecurity events
Drawing on an inquiry into Israel's preparedness for biological threats, in this article I suggest a new analysis of biosecurity events. A complex and dynamic assemblage emerges to prepare for biological threats, one that I call a "pre-event configuration." The assemblage is composed of three core elements-the scientific element, the security element, and the public health element-each of which diagnoses threats and suggests appropriate solutions…
The re-forming state: Actions and repercussions in preparing for future biological events
The article analyzes the heterogeneous forms of action within the state's preparedness assemblage for biological threats in Israel. By examining preparedness practices in two biological preparedness events - the smallpox vaccination project (a possible event) and the ongoing preparations for pandemic influenza (a virtual event) - the analysis maintains that there are a number of simultaneous state practices that emerge in response to various even…
Governing through time: Preparing for Future Threats to Health and Security
During preparations for the Second Gulf War, Israel considered universal smallpox vaccination. In doing so, it faced a problem: how to legitimise carrying out a security action against an uncertain future danger (smallpox pandemic), when this action carried specific, known risks (vaccine complications). To solve this problem, the Israeli preparedness system created a new domain through which the security action could reach its goal with minimum r…
Rebuilding the body through violence and control
In this article, I examine the bodily changes that soldiers undergo in an intensive counter-terrorism military training course. I argue that military draftees develop control and violent capabilities through Violent Reflexive Bodily Practices (VRBPs), a concept I introduce here. VRBPs, which form the core of training in this elite military unit, are simultaneously recursive, reflexive and reconstructive: they are expressed by the soldier's body a…
Governing Future Potential Biothreats: Toward an Anthropology of Uncertainty
Through analysis of preparedness for pandemic influenza in Israel, I explore how future uncertainty is conceptualized and the various practices put into action to deal with it. In particular, I discuss the emergence of a new type of uncertainty-potential uncertainty-and three technologies employed to cope with it: risk technology, preparedness technology, and event technology. Event technology emerges in the preparations for a potential uncertain…
Governing Heterogeneous Populations: Separate and Unequal' in Israel
Drawing on the Israeli 'Immanuel Affair' (also called the 'Israeli Brown Affair'), we examine the complex relationship between governmentality and population compositions. In the town of Immanuel, the State attempted to establish a homogeneous population of ultra-orthodox Jews by opening it to unrestricted settlement. Rather than homogeneity however, this strategy produced a divided community, whose Ashkenazi and Mizrahi residents barely interact…
Introduction by Limor Samimian-Darash and Paul Rabinow
Examining how insurance has been imagined and practiced in various historical configurations of liberal governance, this chapter explores the diverse ways in which security, uncertainty, and freedom change their meanings quite radically. Nineteenth century liberalism emphasized individual foresight as a technique for governing uncertainties (such as the free market) that were imagined to be essential to freedom. Around the turn of the 20th centur…
Modes of Uncertainty: Anthropological Cases
Modes of Uncertainty offers groundbreaking ways of thinking about danger, risk, and uncertainty from an analytical and anthropological perspective. Our world, the contributors show, is increasingly populated by forms, practices, and events whose uncertainty cannot be reduced to risk - and thus it is vital to distinguish between the two. Drawing the lines between them, they argue that the study of uncertainty should not focus solely on the appeara…
Biosecurity as a boundary object: Science, society, and the state
Biosecurity is a concern in many parts of the world but is differently conceived and addressed depending on context. This article draws on two cases concerned with life sciences research involving dangerous pathogens, one in the United States and one in Israel, to examine this variability. In both cases, concern revolves around issues of biosafety and bioterrorism, which are targeted by similar policies and solutions. The cases, nevertheless, dif…
Practicing Uncertainty: Scenario-Based Preparedness Exercises in Israel
In this article, I analyze how the Turning Point scenario-based exercise works as a technology-based uncertainty, both in its conceptualization of the future and in its enactment. The Israeli preparedness exercise involves the activation of and reaction to a chosen event, one that does not replicate the past or attempt to predict the future. Though designed to challenge responders, the scenario does not represent a worst-case event but a plausibl…
Anthropology of security and security in anthropology: Cases of counterterrorism in the United States
In this article we propose a mode of analysis that allows us to consider security as a form distinct from insecurity, in order to capture the heterogeneity of security objects, logics and forms of action. We first develop a genealogy for the anthropology of security, demarcating four main approaches: violence and state terror; military, militarization, and militarism; para-state securitization; and what we submit as 'security assemblages.' Securi…
Unprepared: Global Health in a Time of Emergency by Andrew Lakoff
Reviewed by: Unprepared: Global Health in a Time of Emergency by Andrew Lakoff Limor Samimian-Darash Andrew Lakoff. Unprepared: Global Health in a Time of Emergency. Oakland: University of California Press, 2017. 240 pp. $29.95. (978–0–52029–576–6). This book joins the recent literature that examines future intervention technologies and identifies a new modality of securing against “future threats” that goes beyond Foucauldian biopolitical securi…
Unintended Securitization
In this article, we examine statements by state officials and individuals from the military and the medical establishment regarding the provision of medical aid by Israel to casualties from the Syrian Civil War. We argue discussions of this project have been characterized by three different discourses, each dominant at different times, which we classify as military, medical, and political-security. We propose “unintended securitization” to descri…
Emergency, preparedness, and UK global health policy following the 2014 West African Ebola epidemic
In this article, we analyze UK global health policy in the light of the 2014 Ebola epidemic. Specifically, we focus on the UK government’s intervention in the epidemic, reflections on the UK’s response in parliamentary committees and government-sponsored forums, and subsequent UK global health policy changes. Post-Ebola, we argue, UK global health policy turned into a pursuit of global health emergency-preparedness through development. This, we f…
From Crisis to Emergency: The Shifting Logic of Preparedness
Following the Second Lebanon War (2006), Israeli preparedness exercises were designed in reference to that crisis event. Hold annually for more than a decade, 'Turning Point' exercises are now accompanied by a 'National Emergency Week'. After three years of fieldwork in the National Emergency Management Authority (NEMA) and the Turning Point administration, we came to realise that the conceptualisation of preparedness for such events has morphed.…
Humanitarian Aid, Security and Ethics
The article examines the relationship between humanitarianism, security, and ethics in the case of the provision of medical humanitarian aid by Israel to casualties from the Syrian civil war, between 2013 and 2018. We argue that this humanitarian project differs from the type of humanitarian intervention commonly seen in conflict zones and can be identified as a new form of humanitarian governance. Our case study deals with humanitarian care prov…
Governing uncertainty, producing subjectivity: From Mode I to Mode II scenarios
An emergency of circulation: Entry screening in the UK during the 2014 Ebola epidemic
The rise of emergency governance in global public health has driven a number of changes in this field. In this article, we investigate one of the practices of emergency governance – border screening – and identify a new form of screening that emerged in the UK during the 2014 Ebola epidemic in West Africa. Analysing the UK’s deployment of Ebola entry screening and the public debate that emerged around it, we show how this technology was construct…
Uncertainty by Design: Preparing for the Future with Scenario Technology
This book presents cases of the use of scenario technology in the fields of security and emergency preparedness, energy, and health by analyzing scenario narratives and practices at the National Emergency Management Authority in Israel, the World Health Organization's Regional Office for Europe, and the World Energy Council. Humankind has long struggled with the uncertainty of the future, with how to foresee the future, imagine alternatives, or p…
Scenarios in a Time of Urgency: Shifting Temporality and Technology
This article explores the connection between technology and temporality, and discusses specifically scenario technology and the temporality of urgency, in the context of the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. It illustrates how, despite the inherent orientation toward the future potentiality in this technology, once an actual event occurs and the temporality of preparedness is overridden by a temporality of urgency, the scenario techno…
Governing the future through scenaristic and simulative modalities of imagination
In this article, I examine several expressions of imaginative practices to unpack the umbrella term scenario. Drawing on my long-term fieldwork on Israel's annual Turning Point exercises, I examine actual uses of scenarios and distinguish between two different logics of imaginative practices and the modalities in which the future is governed by them, which I refer to as the scenaristic and the simulative. As I demonstrate, these two modalities ca…
Encapsulation: Governing actual uncertainty in the coronavirus pandemic
The coronavirus pandemic has revived scholarly engagement with the concept of biopolitics, with interpretations diagnosing either the widespread adoption of a classic biopolitical regime or the full-blown emergence of totalitarian repression (or both of these simultaneously). Relying on a close analysis of different interventions taken by Israeli authorities in response to the pandemic, this article argues that, rather than classic biopolitical s…
Encountering future uncertainties through scenario technology
As a social technology, the scenario differs from other techniques usually associated with managing future uncertainties. These draw mainly on the construct of risk and the related notion of risk management - that is, calculation and evaluation based on knowledge of past events, leading to possible control, prevention or prediction of unknowable futures. Scenarios create stories of the future neither to translate them into assessed possibilities …
Unboxing the imaginary: Typology of future imagination techniques in high-tech development
When the future is connected to the term ‘imagination’, it is generally presented through the concept of the ‘imaginary’—that is, an image of the future that is related to a grand social image. In this article, we discuss the concept of sociotechnical imaginaries and argue that although this concept provides a needed perspective that allows scholars to unpack imaginaries associated with technological futures, it often features very broad concepts…
Cutting at the edge: Observations on Innovation Beyond the Urban
Innovation is generally associated with the creation of something new and with economic growth, and is often understood in relation to modernity and its prime social site, 'the city'. Accordingly, the coupling of innovation and rural areas may seem incongruent. Drawing on ethnographic research on Israel's high-tech scene, we analyse innovation centres located primarily in kibbutzim in the northern and southern regions of the country. This allows …
Political science (23 works) · Law (20 works) · Global Security and Public Health (19 works) · Sociology (19 works) · Computer Science (15 works) · Epistemology (13 works) · Law (11 works) · Preparedness (11 works) · Medicine (9 works) · Public relations (8 works)