A perimeter is always porous, to certain people. Managing how it is perforated is a kind of professional work. In my fieldwork at a casino, a guard all in black sheepishly hands out blank visitor IDs that we wear only in a closed room. He collects them on our exit to the floor and accompanies us up to the lobby bar because of regulations. In the discussion, a man expresses his exasperation at an embassy’s request for an ambulance during a US National Special Security Event. I don’t understand why he makes an ambulance sound so ominous—he says he didn’t sleep for days—until someone later explains to me that he was worried the ambulance would be filled with explosives and allowed to slip through security lines. In The Filing Cabinet, Craig Robertson describes how information architecture via office furniture soothed clerks of “the particular anxiety produced by the knowledge that paper records create an alternative paper-based reality to which officials defer” (pp. 253). With two tools, the lanyard and the bollard, I consider how security work engenders and manages similar anxieties about the inherent instability of persons and property. (read more...)