Panel on Governance and the Power of Fear

On Tuesday, November 28, I am presenting “Producing Feared and Fearful Subjects: Misplacement and Vulnerability in the Context of Mandatory Drug Testing and Biometric Surveillance” as part of a panel that examines misplaced and misused fear in the context of regulation and governance. Organized and chaired by Professor Susan Sell, the event is the third part of a four part series on Governance and the power of fear.

About the Panel

The relationship between fear and regulation is not well understood. Fear may be misplaced – think of our outsized fear of sharks, or it may be misused – as when fears of terrorism are used to justify curtailing civil liberties and invading privacy. This panel examines how fear has been misused and misplaced to justify either regulation or inaction.

Kathryn Henne, Adam Henschke, and Jeremy Youde explore the implications of misplaced and misused fear as justifications for misguided regulatory responses and as distractions from urgent and pressing issues. Henne considers the examples of drug testing and biometric authentication of welfare recipients. Henschke explores the role of fear in regulation of surveillance and cyberspace. Youde examines the role of misplaced and misused fear in global health governance.

About the speakers

Kathryn (Kate) Henne is an ARC DECRA Fellow at RegNet. She is also Canada Research Chair in Biogovernance, Law and Society at the University of Waterloo and a Fellow of the Balsillie School of International Affairs. An interdisciplinary researcher whose work is situated at the intersections of socio-legal studies and science and technology studies, she is currently studying how different populations navigate the regulatory conditions associated with seeking social assistance.

Adam Henshke is an applied ethicist, working on areas that cross over between ethics, technology and security. He is a lecturer at the National Security College (NSC) at the Crawford School of Public Policy and a research fellow with Delft University of Technology (TUD) in The Hague, The Netherlands. His research concerns ethical and philosophical analyses of information technology and its uses, military ethics and on relations between ethics and national security. He has published on surveillance, emerging military technologies and intelligence and cyberspace. He is also interested in moral psychology, experimental philosophy and their relations to decision making and policy development.

Jeremy Youde is a Fellow in the Department of International Relations at the Coral Bell School of Asian and Pacific Affairs. His research focuses on questions of global health governance and global health politics. He is the author of three books and co-editor of two recently edited volumes. He has published more than 30 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters in a wide variety of outlets and is a member of the editorial board of Global Health Governance. He is also Treasurer and member of the Executive Council of the Global Health Section of the International Studies Association as well as Member-at-Large on the Executive Board of the International Studies Association’s Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, and Allies (LGBTQA) Caucus.