Discussion Lucy Suchman, Lancaster University, UK Presented at the joint EASST/4S Conference, Tuesday 18 August 2020 ‘Proliferation, dispersal and (in)security: towards new vocabularies for the debate between STS and critical security studies,’ organised by Annalisa Pelizza and Claudia Aradau Dispersal at the border In the abstract for our panel, the conveners propose that growing investment in infrastructures of population management call for reconsideration of the ontological boundaries of security actors. The reconfiguring of ontological/agential boundaries, as both a method and consequence, is to my mind one of the central contributions of STS. The organisers of our panel further suggest that ‘proliferation’ and ‘dispersal’ are key terms for us to think with. The first term references the multiplying translations of agency that enact contemporary security infrastructures, while the second notes the expansion of those infrastructures in ways that extend in/security’s reach. As the papers of this session make clear, the border is a central figure and site for both of these operations. My own engagements at the STS/critical security studies border have heightened my awareness of the intra-relations between militarism and what are commonly seen as the separate realms of migration and border control on one hand, and so-called domestic policing on the other. The historical articulation of these as separate realms is part of the ignorance that we are in the process of unlearning together, through the kinds of intersectional conversations of which this panel is a part. Critical security studies scholars, I’m learning, are finding theorisations from STS richly generative for their thinking about the technologies, artefacts, and sociotechnical imaginaries that constitute the infrastructures of in/security regimes. Reciprocally, as an STS researcher I’ve found that the attention of critical security studies to the discursive and institutional arrangements that hold state power in place is a crucial body of work for my own thinking about questions of US militarism and how it could be otherwise. Claudia Aradau and Sarah Perret Making up data: from migrant traces to border inscriptions A connecting figure across the papers in this session is the large-scale information system, imagined in this context as the fully interoperable joining up of EU border- related databases. This figure is close kin to the US military’s Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure or JEDI, the latest in the fantasy franchise of perfect omniscience through comprehensive datafication. In the case of the EU at this particular moment, the sites of in/security are focused on invasion in the form of migration and asylum seeking. Within these imaginaries, as Claudia and Sarah point out, the equation is a simple one: more data equals greater security, the correlate being that as data proliferate, the need for new investments in automated data analytics grows.