Asher Goldstein

What constitutes and maintains the structures of indifference that enable ongoing extractive plunder by the Canadian polity? As a consequence of taking the erasure of plunder as a starting point, we are invited to examine how contested extractive processes unfold in space and time: their speculative ‘buzz’ phase, their toxifying phase, and their many traumatic after-lives. That such extractive processes always have an emplaced aspect in a ‘site’ where we can encounter them in research or classification goes without saying, but of particular importance to my research are its embodied aspects, which are transmissible across space and generations insofar as communities under extractive pressure are toxified and restructured into no-places of unrestrained profit-potential, marked by monopolistic or oligopolistic life-worlds of expulsion. Two questions arising from this attention to lived communal experiences of extraction and explored across the cases are: what do those displaced by extraction carry with them? How are transversal projects of resistance articulated?

This project will explore the internationalisation of the Swedish private security industry in the contemporary period. The mixed methods research project employs qualitative and quantitative register-data research and ethnographic interviews of working private security guards, or vaktare and ‘safety-entrepeneurs,’ or trygghetsentreprenör. Looking at the internationalisation both here in Sweden in the working profession as well as the business model allows for a multilayered contextually informed project in who, how, and in what ways 'safety' and 'security' are commodified, marketed, and provided in Sweden.