FELLOW 2021-2022 & AFFILIATED RESEARCHER 2022-2023 NINA BOY
Fellowship Term: 04/2021-06/2022
Nina Boy is currently a Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Warwick. Her work focuses on current transdisciplinary – political, financial, and legal – notions of security, informed by history, archaeology, and literary studies. Nina holds a PhD in Politics from Lancaster University, an MA in International Studies & Diplomacy from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London and an MA (Joint Honours) in French and Philosophy from the University of Edinburgh. She was a Marie Sklodowska Curie COFUND Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies at the University of Warwick (2018-2020) and Senior Researcher at the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO) (2014-2017), where she led a work package on Financial security in the EU FP7-funded Societal Security Network (SOURCE) and held interdisciplinary PhD courses at the Research School on Peace and Conflict. She was also invited as visiting fellow to the Collaborative Research Centre (SFB) Dynamics of Security at the Universities of Marburg and Giessen (2016-2017). Since 2016 she has been, and continues to be, co-editor of the peer-reviewed open access journal Finance and Society.
INTERVIEW WITH CAPAS FELLOW NINA BOY
Clashing Epistemologies of the Future? Risk, Resilience, and Apocalypse
The project situates the epistemology of the (post-)apocalypse in the current landscape of anticipatory security governance in order to differentiate an apocalypse as a boundary concept within tropes of crisis. Within security technologies of the 21st century, the (post-)apocalypse appears to sit at odds with the rule of the unexpected, radically uncertain future demanding anticipatory action in the form of pre-emption and resilience. If the apocalypse fits into a global atmosphere of doom and large-scale irreversible damage, its fatal certainty and inherent revelation of truth belie regimes of plausible and actionable fictions that inform the governance of the future via scenario-planning and simulation. The question takes on a further dimension in the era of post-truth politics and the shift in epistemic authority from facts to data. While an apocalypse, like resilience, generates the conditions for a new post-apocalyptic order, its trope is not functional and system-based, but has connotations of tragedy and the human epic. The project explores the epistemology of apocalypses in three steps: 1) Plausible futures, 2) Apocalyptic truth in the era of post-truth politics, and 3) A post-apocalyptic world vs systemic resilience.