Job/Security: A Composite Portrait of the Expanding American Security Industry

Job/Security: A Composite Portrait of the Expanding American Security Industry

Job/Security: A Composite Portrait of the Expanding American Security Industry

Job/Security: A Composite Portrait of the Expanding American Security Industry

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Overview

An illuminating collection of candid interviews and photographs with workers in America’s burgeoning security state.

In a world increasingly under surveillance, this cutting-edge documentary collaboration turns the camera on the ever-expanding American security state. Job/Security bears photographic and narrative witness to the people tasked with safeguarding our modern world. In these uniquely revealing interviews and photographs, authors Danny Goodwin and Edward Schwarzschild assemble a multifaceted portrait of the labor of security. They offer a close-up, in-depth look at what the near-ubiquitous business of monitoring, guarding, and protecting life and property in the United States means for the individuals who do the work, and for the society they ostensibly serve.

Representing a wide range of perspectives from inside this vast field, Job/Security features men and women who work in homeland security, border patrol, the secret service, and emergency management, among other fields. In candid terms, these enforcers, critics, and targets of security regimes describe their working lives—their jobs, routines, backgrounds, and families—as well as their feelings about what they do. Their stories offer a rare glimpse into the internal complexities of security work and fresh insight into what the encroaching security state is doing to America’s hearts and minds, one worker at a time, and to society at large, on an intimately human scale.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780262048699
Publisher: MIT Press
Publication date: 08/13/2024
Series: Labor and Technology
Pages: 216
Sales rank: 921,379
Product dimensions: 8.00(w) x 10.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Danny Goodwin is Professor and Chair of the Department of Art and Art History at the University at Albany, SUNY. His photographic, video, and installation work has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions and published extensively in the United States and Europe.

Edward Schwarzschild is Professor and Director of Creative Writing in the English Department at the University at Albany, SUNY. He is the author of three works of fiction, In Security, The Family Diamond, and Responsible Men; and his writing has appeared in the Guardian, the Believer, Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“The modern security state is more decried than understood, which makes Job/Security such an invaluable book. A fascinating and intimate look at the security industry at the human level.”
—Phil Klay, National Book Award–winning author of Redeployment and Uncertain Ground
 
“Danny Goodwin and Edward Schwarzschild have crafted a fascinating portrait of the ever-expanding state of American security, shining a bright light on the people who labor in this field. Job/Security is an essential and necessary read, masterfully done.”
—Gilbert King, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Devil in the Grove
 
“An unusual, highly entertaining way to visualize and ponder the vast, deeply entrenched, often invisible nature of the ever-growing US security state.”
—Dana Priest, two-time Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist; coauthor of Top Secret America
 
“Goodwin and Schwarzschild have compiled an extraordinary and unique document, often empathetic and neutral while also depicting dark, enigmatic, inaccessible sites.”
—James Casebere, artist
 
“A truly distinctive work, both for its content and for the range of voices and agendas that come to the fore.”
—Harvey Molotch, author of Against Security
   
“Goodwin and Schwarzschild offer creative and original approaches to understanding and critically analyzing security work. By focusing on the accounts and experiences of security workers, we come to know the world of security from the inside and with new depth and detail.”
—Marieke de Goede, Professor of Politics, University of Amsterdam; author of Speculative Security
 
“The first-person narratives in this book humanize the people who often appear to us citizens as uniforms only—as representatives of a larger, seemingly singular system. Their reflections offer us ways to question the systems they uphold, and by doing so, allow us to rethink the kind of systems we want to build.”
—Jill Magid, artist, writer, and filmmaker

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