Professor Ed Schwarzschild Spring 2024 fellow at Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences
Professor Ed Schwarzschild will be participating as a fellow at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIAS) in Spring 2024. Located in Amsterdam, this international institute is dedicated to promoting interdisciplinary and collaborative studies. The official announcement of next year's NIAS fellows was posted in early June.
Professor Schwarzschild organized a theme group titled "Re-imagining Security Labour." He will be working with anthropologists and labor studies sociologists on this project, whose topic is summarized in the following way: "How can a deeper understanding of individuals in the security labor force shape the future of security work? There are myriad examples of how, in general, descriptions of security labour in the media tend to villainize or heroize the workers, criticising them as lazy and uneducated, or, celebrating them as patriotic and brave. This NIAS Theme Group will bring their own deeply informed practices and varied viewpoints regarding the global security enterprise to our collaborative investigation."
This work continues Professor Schwarzschild's ongoing research and writing about labor in the evolution of the security state in his novel In Security (2020) and Job Security (forthcoming 2024), an oral history and photography project with Danny Goodwin, UAlbany Professor of Art. With this new fellowship, Professor Schwarzschild's ongoing work will begin to consider the global and international dimensions of security politics and their effects on labor.