How to Discomfort a Worldview? Social Sciences, Surveillance Technologies and Defamiliarization

This chapter proposes two thinking exercises—or techniques—to nurture researchers’ ability to discomfort (their) worldviews: symmetric dispositifs and wildlife pictures. We believe that these thinking exercises can help us, and maybe other researchers, to achieve estrangement; i.e. to produce descriptions of our research objects that make them open to new, and possibly alternative, relations with them and among them. Our efforts are not to deny or debunk worldviews, but rather to provisionally break them apart, to destabilize them, to separate the worlds from the views, and then reunite them by emphasizing their constant and dynamic mutual construction. Practicing and embracing estrangement may help revive the desire to explore, test and fasten alternative world-view relationships, and—especially when security and surveillance technologies are at stake—it may highlight the (absurd) mechanisms of the power relations of everyday life.