Designing affect into security: shared situational awareness protocols and the habit of emergency response

Abstract

The article engages with and extends emergent debates regarding the envelopment of affective life in practices of security through research into the design of shared situational awareness protocols used in emergency response. Crafted to address what are commonly called ‘multi-agency’ incidents, shared situational awareness protocols aim to generate real time, dynamic understandings of emergency situations that can be held consensually among different authorities in order to facilitate coordinated modes of intervention. I draw on recent conceptualisations in cultural geography of the notion of habit in two ways to explore how such protocols enrol, regulate and mobilise the affective capacities of responder bodies to orchestrate emergency response. Habit first opens up to consideration the complex temporality that protocols may inscribe into the embodied performance of emergency response. Read in relation to habit, protocols appear as security techniques that simultaneously formulate response into a sequence of actions in anticipation of emergencies whilst enabling responders to adapt to emergencies as volatile situations unfolding in an indeterminate, real-time present. Second, habit orients exploration towards the modes of affect-based sense-making practices that protocols seek to integrate into this performance. On one hand, protocols have been designed with the goal of affording responder bodies the capacity to enact what Brian Massumi refers to as affective attunement as a means to render emergencies intelligible. On the other, protocol design seeks to inculcate responder bodies with the capacity to execute what I call ‘empathic sense-making’ whereby authorities are able to coordinate with one another by operating with a perception of the emergency that traverses the confines of their immediate spatial and temporal embodied encounter with it. Synthesising protocol design with habit ultimately reveals much about how emergency planners consider bodily capacity an active agent that both guides the structure of intervention and enrols particular modes of cognition into emergency response and security.