08.07.2017

Departmental Seminar: Governing Gas

Peter Forman (Teach@Tübingen) at Wednesday, 12 July 2017 · 16 h c.t. · Room 124, Institut für Politikwissenschaft

<link internal-link internal link in current>Peter Forman is a Teach@Tübingen fellow at the Institute of Political Science in Tübingen. He recently completed his doctorate at the University of Durham, studying political geography.
His research interests include theorising the nexus between (in)security politics, materiality and circulation. In particular, he looks at how the specific qualities of moving elements necessitate different kinds of specialised security practice, and the forms of security politics that consequently emerge.
For his PhD, Peter Forman explored the ways that security is performed in relation to circulations of natural gas in the UK. He examined how a complex assemblage of heterogeneous security actors comes to form around gas as it moves, documenting how these actors work to visualise the fields of possibility that surround the gas, and the ways in which they alter its ontological structure to bring about or inhibit particular kinds of perceived phenomena. Central to his thesis was the claim that security is transformative; that vibrant, vital, circulating things are actively mutated through the process of their securitisation.