Risk Technologies and the Securitization of Post-9/11 Citizenship: The Case of National ID Cards in Canada.

The attacks of 11 September 2001 on Washington and New York continue to influence how governments manage im/migration, citizenship, and national security. One of the more contentious national security responses to the events of 9/11 in Canada has been the drive to introduce a biometric national identification card. In this paper, we argue that the drive for a Canadian national ID card is bound up in ideological processes which threaten to exacerbate, rather than to alleviate, state insecurities pertaining to risk, citizenship, and border (in) security. We maintain that ‘proof of status’ surveillance technologies, such as biometrically-encoded ID cards, lead to the ‘securitization’ of citizenship, and we conclude that ID cards threaten to destabilize the modern spatializations of sovereignty that they are purported to uphold under the guise of national security

Social Problems and the Contextual Compromise: Subjectivity, Objectivity, and Knowledge in Everyday Life

This article builds on recent sociological debates about the explanatory importance of claims-making contexts and the continuing challenges associated with subjectivism and objectivism in social problems research. The sociology of knowledge is used to illustrate how the contextual compromise that has sustained social problems theory and method for at least two decades is based on a number of erroneous assumptions about subjectivity and objectivity in the tradition of phenomenological analysis. To strengthen recent discussions about the contextual dimensions of claims-making activities and framing techniques, the article critically assesses the curious neglect and continuing misrepresentation of the sociology of knowledge in constructionist analyses of social problems

The cultural politics of contemporary moral panic studies: reflections on a changing research agenda

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Constructing a discursive crisis: Risk, problematization and illegal Chinese in Canada

This article discusses the relationship between the socio-economic success of the Chinese in Canada, news discourse and the problematization of nearly 600 undocumented Fujianese migrants who arrived on Canada's western shores from July-September 1999. Our interests rest in examining the thematic patterns of the coverage, i.e. how the migrants' arrivals were 'problematized' and transformed into a discursive crisis centred on the constructs of 'risk' and, more precisely, 'risk avoidance'. It is our contention that news reporting on the migrants holds broader ideological resonances, extending beyond a unilateral concern about the perceived failure of the Canadian immigration and refugee systems. We argue that the reporting of these events serves as an index for collective insecurities stemming from social change, racial integration and contested Euro-Canadian hegemony