From the 20th to the 21st of May I am attending the conference “Translations of Security: Changing social understandings of threats, risks and dangers” which marks the significant achievements of the Center for Advanced Security Theory (CAST) of the University of Copenhagen in the field of security studies. The three day event brings together a range of prominent security thinkers and especially foregrounds the exchange with other disciplines as well as practice. This is how the organizers sum up the conference theme

In contemporary security, an increasingly wide range of agencies, organizations and businesses play a central role in defining security policy and security political knowledge. This ‘diffusion’ of security knowledge and management changes the mere meaning of our concepts and practices of security – what is at stake in the processing of threats, risks, dangers and security.

The conference will take ‘new security studies’ beyond the established theoretical debates and schools and ask questions to translation of security across disciplines and in practice. In theoretical and empirical terms it will address how meetings between different fields of practice continually challenge, modify or maintain social understandings of security threats, risks and dangers.

At the conference we will thereby attempt to think security beyond securitizations and not focus on how different sectors or fields increasingly incorporate one specific security logic (securitization). Instead, this conference will draw attention to how different spheres, organizations, and cultures manage threats and what happens when objects or issues move among and across these.