Cultural Construction of Safety and Security

Gemma Blok is a professor in the History of Mental Health and Culture at the Open University of the Netherlands. Her areas of expertise are the histories of psychiatry, addiction treatment, and drug use. She was a principal investigator in the HERA-funded project Governing the Narcotic City. Imaginaries, Practices and Discourses of Public Drug Cultures in European Cities from 1970 until Today. Jan Oosterholt is assistant professor at the Dutch Open University. He is specialised in nineteenth-century literature and has published books and articles on literary poetics, imagology and adaptations. His current research focuses on literary transfers and theatrical texts.

• Introduction – Gemma Blok and Jan Oosterholt Section 1: Philosophical conceptualisations of safety Chapter 1: Eddo Evink - Security, Certainty, Trust. Historical and Contemporary Aspects of the Concept of Safety Chapter 2: Ana Alicia Carmona Aliaga - Tolerance, a Safety Policy in Pierre Bayle’s Thought Chapter 3: Tom Giesbers - The Shackles of Freedom. The Modern Philosophical Notion of Public Safety Section 2: Security cultures in history Chapter 4: Beatrice de Graaf - The Invention of Collective Security after 1815 Chapter 5: Vincent Baptist - Criminal, Cosmopolitan, Commodified. How Rotterdam’s Interwar Amusement Street the Schiedamsedijk Became a Safe Mirror Image of Itself Chapter 6: Gemma Blok, Peter-Paul Bänzinger and Lisanne Walma - Tourists, Dealers or Addicts. Security Practices in Response to Open Drug Scenes in Amsterdam, Rotterdam and Zurich, 1960-2000 Section 3: Narratives and imaginaries of safety Chapter 7: Nils Büttner - The ‘Golden Age’ Revisited. Images and Notions of Safety in Insecure Times Chapter 8: Frederik Van Dam - Safety as Nostalgia. Infrastructural Breakdown in Stefan Zweig’s Beware of Pity (1938) Chapter 9: Roos van Strien - Brace for Impact. Spatial Responses to Terror in the Cities Belfast and Oslo Section 4: Narratives and imaginaries of unsafety Chapter 10: Sigrid Ruby - Safe at Home? The Domestic Space in Early Modern Visual Culture Chapter 11: Jan Oosterholt - The Transfer of Nineteenth-Century Representations of Unsafety. A Dutch Adaptation of Eugène Sue’s Les Mystères de Paris Chapter 12: Femke Kok - Feeling Lost in a Modernising World. A Critique on Martha Nussbaum’s Emotion Theory through an Analysis of Feelings of Unsafety in Magda Szabó’s Iza’s Ballad