Abstract
The contributors to Absence in Science, Security and Policy have pursued two main aims. One has been to identify and account for what is “not”: for whom, when, and under what circumstances scientific and security matters are varyingly treated as “of concern.” Along with identifying and accounting for “what is not” in relation to matters of security and science policy, a second aim of this book has been to undertake an accompanying assessment about how, when, and under what circumstances social research is bound up with making concerns absent and present.
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Notes
See Ponting, C. 1990. Secrecy in Britain. London: Basil;
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This happens, for instance, when past research ineptitudes admitted serve to underscore how the ethnographer has moved on from unskilful to more skilful interventions. See Atkinson, P. 1990. The Ethnographic Imagination. London: Routledge.
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See Walsh, Timothy. 1998. The Dark Matter of Words. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press: 111.
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For initial commentary along these lines, see Rappert, B. 2014. “Present absences: Hauntings and whirlwinds in ‘-graphy’,” Social Epistemology 28(1): 41–55 and Rappert. 2010. “Revealing and concealing secrets in research”: 571–588.
For analysis of the diverse range of functions of silence and silencing see, for example, Eliasoph, N. 1998. Avoiding Politics. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press;
Braman, S. 2007. “When nightingales break the law: Silence and the construction of reality,” Ethics and Information Technology 9: 281–295; and
Pagis, M. 2010. “Producing intersubjectivity in silence: An ethnographic study of meditation practice,” Ethnography 11(2): 309–328.
Jaworski, A. 1997. “Introduction,” in Adam Jaworski (ed.). Silence: Interdisciplinary Perspectives. The Hague: Mouton de Gruyter: 3.
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© 2015 Brian Rappert and Brian Balmer
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Rappert, B., Balmer, B. (2015). Concluding Absences. In: Rappert, B., Balmer, B. (eds) Absence in Science, Security and Policy. Global Issues Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137493736_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137493736_11
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