This panel invites papers that examine how safety and insecurity are produced through everyday spatial arrangements and material environments across African contexts. Rather than treating “security” as something enacted only through state institutions, armed actors, or formal policy, we foreground the ordinary places and infrastructures through which people come to sense, navigate, and negotiate risk: homes and streets, markets and transport nodes, schools and clinics, offices and compounds, border crossings and humanitarian sites.
We welcome contributions that explore how built form, maintenance and repair, circulation and access, design and improvisation, and the affective atmospheres of places shape experiences of protection, vulnerability, and belonging. Papers might consider how boundaries are made and unmade (through walls, gates, checkpoints, signage, lighting, surveillance, or “soft” forms of control), how infrastructures distribute exposure and care (water, power, housing, digital networks), and how these spatial practices intersect with race, class, gender, nationality, and citizenship. We are especially interested in work that traces security as relational and contested—generated through routines, social histories, and shifting expectations—rather than as a fixed condition or a purely coercive apparatus.
The panel is open to a wide range of theoretical and methodological approaches, including political geography, anthropology, critical security studies, STS, infrastructure studies, urban studies, and interpretive or historical methods. Empirically, we welcome papers from diverse sites and scales, from neighborhood governance and everyday policing to transnational presence, humanitarian governance, urban redevelopment, and post/conflict reconstruction. Single-case studies, comparative analyses, and multi-sited projects are all encouraged.
Keywords: everyday security; space and place; infrastructure; urban studies; borders; policing; care and protection; material politics; Africa.
Please reach out to Felix Brender (f.brender@lse.ac.uk) with an abstract by 10 March at the very latest.
I look forward to your contributions!
