Marian Hawkesworth's research while affiliated with The University of Manchester and other places

Co-produced research is an increasingly prominent feature of universities. Collaboration can bring many benefits, offering unique and illuminating insights into the interface between theory, academia, policy and practice. Moreover, it often facilitates access to otherwise impenetrable fields of study. Yet it also brings immense challenges. This article describes the knowledge co-production process in a research project looking at national security, focusing on the collaboration between academia and government policy-makers. As demonstrated, critical tensions emerged in the commissioning process, in the conduct of the empirical work, and with regard to the dissemination of findings. The authors discuss various coping strategies employed to meet these challenges, which are applicable across other aspects of research co-production.

Urban defences against terrorism have traditionally been based on territorial interventions that sought to seal off and surveil certain public and private spaces considered targets. Lately, though, a much wider range of crowded and public spaces have been viewed as potential targets and thus have been identified as requiring additional security. This has immense implications for the experience of the ‘everyday’ urban landscape. Drawing on contemporary notions that incorporate the study of aesthetics and emotions within critical security and terrorism studies, this article discusses the visual impact of counter-terrorism security measures. It analyses the ‘transmission’ of symbolic messages, as well as the variety of ways in which security might be ‘received’ by various stakeholders. The analysis takes place against the backdrop of concern that obtrusive security measures have the capacity to radically alter public experiences of space and in some cases lead to (intended and unintended) exclusionary practices or a range of negative emotional responses. The article concludes by outlining a ‘spectrum of visible security’ ranging between traditional obtrusive fortified approaches and approaches that embed security features seamlessly or even ‘invisibly’ into the urban fabric.

This paper evaluates organisational changes in English local authority building-control departments (BCD), in a context in which the adoption and development of management procedure, technique, and process, more commonly associated with corporate private-sector enterprises, are occurring. Referring to data based on twenty-nine interviews with building surveyors, we show that change in building control is complex and contradictory, and best thought of as the emergence of new capacities, competencies, and interactions (of regulation) both within BCD, and between BCD and new actors and agents. This includes the enlargement of the regulatory networks of BCD, through the use of external expert advisors, and by the formation of, sometimes unstable, partnerships in which BCD may work with each other and with clients of building-control services. Such partnerships and networks are part of a complexity of regulation, in which outcomes are not the products of any one professional, or actor, but part of a diversity of overlapping relations and interventions. Such relations, we argue, are part of a process that may undermine, even dismantle, the public provision of building-control services.