Things for living with terror: a global history of the materialities of urban terror and security
This cultural history of urban terror and security look at how ordinary urban citizens have used technology to live with man-made terrors and threats from bombs.
Technologically shaped fears’ and terrors’ importance for everyday urban life is studied through a history of urban ‘terrormindedness’ – widespread sociotechnical practices and behaviors related to man-made terror. The history is divided into airmindedness, c1900-1945, nuclearmindedness, 1945-c1990 and terrorismmindedness, c1990- today, each studied in a separate case study of a specific technology: gas mask use in WWII London, nuclear fallout shelters in Cold War New York, and car bomb barricades in Tel Aviv from the 1990s. The case studies have been chosen to explore a period’s central significant terrormindedness characteristics. Furthermore, each case is compared with a similar smaller study from a contrasting global urban context: the London case is contrasted by gas mask use in WWII Berlin, New York’s fallout shelters with Cold War Stockholm and Tel Aviv’s reaction to terrorism with Tokyo’s protective terrorist measures. This relativize, contrast and globalize the results.
Primary source material are diaries, letters and interviews describing individuals’ emotions and behaviors related to fear and security to study what role technologies provide for urban civilians’ experience of terror and security. The study include longer study visits in the studied cities for archival research and interviews.
Final report
The purpose of the project is to provide a global cultural-historical study of urban terror and security, focusing on the lives, mentalities, and material realities of ordinary people under the shadow of terrorist threats. It examines how various forms of technology have been used to cope with living amidst man-made terror threats. The project's central concept is ‘terrormindness’ – a terror mentality linked to sociotechnical practices and behaviors – whose history is divided into three periods from the early 20th century, based on how this mentality has evolved and been shaped by its characteristic terror technologies: airmindedness in response to the threat of aerial bombing (c. 1900–1945), nuclearmindedness during the Cold War era's atomic bomb threats (1945–c. 1990), and terrorismmindedness over the past few decades (since c. 1990). Each period focuses on a central security technology: gas masks for feared gas bomb attacks before and during World War II, nuclear fallout shelters during the Cold War, and search technologies to detect concealed terrorism bombs and weapons since the 1990s. The project has studied various expressions of material and institutional terrormindness in cities in the UK, Germany, USA, Sweden, Pakistan, and Japan. The selection of these countries aimed to provide a global historical narrative of these developments and to illustrate a spectrum of national and local strategies for addressing terror threats.
During the project, its scope expanded from focusing on individual urban residents' experiences to include the broader societal reception of terrormindness within political, technological, and cultural spheres. This included studies of how politicians, engineers, scientists, and artists contributed to domesticating new forms of terrormindness through their work.
The most significant change in the project's implementation was that it was based at the Department of Literature, History of Ideas, and Religion (LIR) at the University of Gothenburg, rather than the Division of History of Science, Technology, and Environment at KTH. LIR provided a strong, project-relevant research environment in the history of technology, science, and political ideas and offered me a part-time position as Deputy Director of its Centre for Digital Humanities. During the project, the biggest challenge was that COVID-19 complicated international case studies and fieldwork. After the pandemic began, I inquired with RJ about using part of my project funding for a sub-study on COVID-19 as an emerging form of terrormindness, but this request was denied.
Between March and June 2019, I was in Berlin at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG), which provided me with discussion partners in the Netherlands, South Korea, Germany, Israel, Japan, and China, and led to the organization of a reading group on posthumanism and a posthumanist conference session at SHOT in Milan I 2019, as well as a project publication in a research anthology. I also conducted archival research at the Imperial War Museum London, the Rockefeller Archive in Tarrytown, NY, the New York Public Library, and the Henry Moore Foundation in Perry Green, UK.
After visiting Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) in Pakistan in 2019, I reconsidered my choice of Tel Aviv for a field study in favor of Lahore. Pakistan's extreme situation regarding the normalization of terror threats made Lahore a more suitable candidate, particularly as a less Western-centric choice for my primary Asian case study. Thus, in 2023, I conducted field studies in Lahore in November and in Tokyo in December. Preliminary results from these two field studies were presented in May 2024 in an invited keynote, "Global Dialects of Urban Terrormindedness," at the annual conference of Finnish urban studies researchers. In addition to already published works, two more publications are being finalized.
The project's most significant scholarly results are the development of "terrormindness" as a conceptual tool for historical and contemporary research into security mentalities, as well as providing empirical findings on the link between technologies and fear. Notably, the research on my London case study has yielded the project's first significant findings in the form of rich empirical accounts of individual experiences with gas masks during World War II, presented in the anthology chapter "Keep Calm and Carry One." The second significant finding concerns the global dissemination of terrormindness, particularly through artistic representations, such as feature films, visual arts, and sculpture. This is explored in a study of artistic terror materiality in the works of British artist Henry Moore, specifically his nuclear-focused sculptures "Atomic Piece" and "Nuclear Energy," discussed in the publication "What is Global Nuclear Culture?" This work has been central to conceptualizing the global cultural and popular reception of terrormindness, which I plan to explore further in future research. The third key finding builds on the previous point and concerns the evolution of the concept of terrormindness beyond individual experiences to its discursive domestication at broader societal and institutional levels, particularly the normalization of terrorism as a social phenomenon. The main result here is the article "Engineering Terrorismmindedness," which examines the global impact of the 9/11 effect on research priorities, and the article "The Diachrony of Political Terror," which addresses the normalization of terrormindness within political discourse.
The main conclusions of the project are that it clearly demonstrates the emotional and individual significance of security mentalities, which is a central research result for STS and historical research, as well as an important contribution to discussions on how terror should be addressed in a broader societal context. Furthermore, the project demonstrates that "terrormindness" is a useful conceptualization for understanding the significance of materiality at both individual and societal levels.
Three new research questions of different kinds have emerged. The first concerns the most appropriate technology to reflect the current terrorism mentality. Inspired by discussions with Israeli and Pakistani colleagues, I have reevaluated the role of security bollards (and barricades) as today's central anti-terror technology – despite their iconic Swedish significance during the Drottninggatan attack in 2017 – in favor of "search technology" in the form of manual and mechanical body searches. However, I still view bollards and barricades as central, as search ecologies are tied to various forms of physical access control maintained by bollards and barricades (and guards). The second research question concerns the global spread of terrormindness, which emerged from the London study on gas masks and research on their artistic representations. Finally, the COVID-19 crisis has raised the question of whether we still live in a third phase of terrorismmindedness or if it has been replaced by a fourth phase of virusmindedness, with the face mask as its iconic anti-terror materiality. While this new overarching threat mentality was prominent during COVID, today it has receded in public consciousness, and terrorism remains the central global terror mentality among individuals and institutions.
The project's findings have been disseminated through presentations at conferences in Denmark, Finland, Norway, Italy, and the UK, as well as seminars in Sweden, Norway, Pakistan, and Germany, and through participation in Nordic media. In addition to impact within the history of science and technology and STS, the results have had interdisciplinary influence in security studies, urban studies, and digital humanities. Six open-access publications have been released within the project, with two more under preparation. Beyond traditional disciplines, the research has reached interdisciplinary audiences. In security studies, I was invited to present at the "Technology and Security: Nordic Security Technologies and Societal Values Final Conference" in Copenhagen in 2019 and at the Nordic Conference on Violent Extremism in Helsinki in 2021. Finally, the project results have also been communicated in popular science formats, including interviews and media appearances discussing materiality and protective technologies for urban residents’ perceived safety and insecurity regarding terror threats.
During the project, its scope expanded from focusing on individual urban residents' experiences to include the broader societal reception of terrormindness within political, technological, and cultural spheres. This included studies of how politicians, engineers, scientists, and artists contributed to domesticating new forms of terrormindness through their work.
The most significant change in the project's implementation was that it was based at the Department of Literature, History of Ideas, and Religion (LIR) at the University of Gothenburg, rather than the Division of History of Science, Technology, and Environment at KTH. LIR provided a strong, project-relevant research environment in the history of technology, science, and political ideas and offered me a part-time position as Deputy Director of its Centre for Digital Humanities. During the project, the biggest challenge was that COVID-19 complicated international case studies and fieldwork. After the pandemic began, I inquired with RJ about using part of my project funding for a sub-study on COVID-19 as an emerging form of terrormindness, but this request was denied.
Between March and June 2019, I was in Berlin at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG), which provided me with discussion partners in the Netherlands, South Korea, Germany, Israel, Japan, and China, and led to the organization of a reading group on posthumanism and a posthumanist conference session at SHOT in Milan I 2019, as well as a project publication in a research anthology. I also conducted archival research at the Imperial War Museum London, the Rockefeller Archive in Tarrytown, NY, the New York Public Library, and the Henry Moore Foundation in Perry Green, UK.
After visiting Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) in Pakistan in 2019, I reconsidered my choice of Tel Aviv for a field study in favor of Lahore. Pakistan's extreme situation regarding the normalization of terror threats made Lahore a more suitable candidate, particularly as a less Western-centric choice for my primary Asian case study. Thus, in 2023, I conducted field studies in Lahore in November and in Tokyo in December. Preliminary results from these two field studies were presented in May 2024 in an invited keynote, "Global Dialects of Urban Terrormindedness," at the annual conference of Finnish urban studies researchers. In addition to already published works, two more publications are being finalized.
The project's most significant scholarly results are the development of "terrormindness" as a conceptual tool for historical and contemporary research into security mentalities, as well as providing empirical findings on the link between technologies and fear. Notably, the research on my London case study has yielded the project's first significant findings in the form of rich empirical accounts of individual experiences with gas masks during World War II, presented in the anthology chapter "Keep Calm and Carry One." The second significant finding concerns the global dissemination of terrormindness, particularly through artistic representations, such as feature films, visual arts, and sculpture. This is explored in a study of artistic terror materiality in the works of British artist Henry Moore, specifically his nuclear-focused sculptures "Atomic Piece" and "Nuclear Energy," discussed in the publication "What is Global Nuclear Culture?" This work has been central to conceptualizing the global cultural and popular reception of terrormindness, which I plan to explore further in future research. The third key finding builds on the previous point and concerns the evolution of the concept of terrormindness beyond individual experiences to its discursive domestication at broader societal and institutional levels, particularly the normalization of terrorism as a social phenomenon. The main result here is the article "Engineering Terrorismmindedness," which examines the global impact of the 9/11 effect on research priorities, and the article "The Diachrony of Political Terror," which addresses the normalization of terrormindness within political discourse.
The main conclusions of the project are that it clearly demonstrates the emotional and individual significance of security mentalities, which is a central research result for STS and historical research, as well as an important contribution to discussions on how terror should be addressed in a broader societal context. Furthermore, the project demonstrates that "terrormindness" is a useful conceptualization for understanding the significance of materiality at both individual and societal levels.
Three new research questions of different kinds have emerged. The first concerns the most appropriate technology to reflect the current terrorism mentality. Inspired by discussions with Israeli and Pakistani colleagues, I have reevaluated the role of security bollards (and barricades) as today's central anti-terror technology – despite their iconic Swedish significance during the Drottninggatan attack in 2017 – in favor of "search technology" in the form of manual and mechanical body searches. However, I still view bollards and barricades as central, as search ecologies are tied to various forms of physical access control maintained by bollards and barricades (and guards). The second research question concerns the global spread of terrormindness, which emerged from the London study on gas masks and research on their artistic representations. Finally, the COVID-19 crisis has raised the question of whether we still live in a third phase of terrorismmindedness or if it has been replaced by a fourth phase of virusmindedness, with the face mask as its iconic anti-terror materiality. While this new overarching threat mentality was prominent during COVID, today it has receded in public consciousness, and terrorism remains the central global terror mentality among individuals and institutions.
The project's findings have been disseminated through presentations at conferences in Denmark, Finland, Norway, Italy, and the UK, as well as seminars in Sweden, Norway, Pakistan, and Germany, and through participation in Nordic media. In addition to impact within the history of science and technology and STS, the results have had interdisciplinary influence in security studies, urban studies, and digital humanities. Six open-access publications have been released within the project, with two more under preparation. Beyond traditional disciplines, the research has reached interdisciplinary audiences. In security studies, I was invited to present at the "Technology and Security: Nordic Security Technologies and Societal Values Final Conference" in Copenhagen in 2019 and at the Nordic Conference on Violent Extremism in Helsinki in 2021. Finally, the project results have also been communicated in popular science formats, including interviews and media appearances discussing materiality and protective technologies for urban residents’ perceived safety and insecurity regarding terror threats.