CSoS ECR outstanding research article award 2023 winner

The CSoS ECR Outstanding Research Article Award Committee 2023, consisting of Dr Colleen Bell, Dr Helen Berents and Dr Somdeep Sen from the editorial team, are pleased to announce the winner and a runner-up for this year’s award. The Award recognises and celebrates early career scholars making an innovative and significant contribution to critical security studies. Recipients must be sole author of a regular research article accepted for publication through the journal’s regular submission and review process each year. The Committee read and evaluated the submissions in a confidential process. The 2022 award goes to Håvard Rustad Markussen, for their article, entitled, ‘Conceptualising the smartphone as a security device: appropriations of embodied connectivity at the Black Lives Matter protests’. Markussen makes a strong argument for the importance of objects to the formation of new repertoires of security, offering a high level of conceptual sophistication concerning the extended embodiment of the smartphone and the potential for its (re)appropriation by a range of actors. By applying philosophical insights on the agentic capacity of objects, Markussen theorises smart phones as newly embodied devices of connectivity that are both racialised and post-human. These insights are stretched to analyse the surveillance of Black Lives Matters protests and protesters strategies of countersurveillance. The committee found that the article presents a valuable and illustrative case study of police power and resistance to it, illuminating the racialisation of surveillance through smart phone technology. It is exemplary critical work in the field. This was a unanimous decision. Markussen’s article can be accessed here: https://doi.org/10. 1080/21624887.2022.2128596