Pete Chambers

Research Focus:

Border security (sovereignty, security, territory); global crime (smuggling, trafficking, crossing); critical theory of infrastructure, logistics, distribution; social theory, systems theory, criminological theory; modes (of production, distribution, transport, existence)

Contact: 

peter.chambers@rmit.edu.au

Publications: 

Staff Profile

Pete teaches Global Crime and Border Security at RMIT, where he is senior lecturer in criminology and justice. Both courses emphasise borders, boundaries, and movement; emergence and contingency, the changing role and form of globalisation, the state and its  sovereignty, contemporary capitalism, and the norms driving the politics that shape how and why people and things move as they do, where they do, in the ways they do – especially as observed threats and harms move toward us in Melbourne. Pete’s work responds to basic questions about the worlds we live in now, sits within traditions of critical and social theory, and emphasises the importance of norms and values, especially conflicting visions of justice and the good society. 

Pete’s scholarly interests are space and power, social change, and urban conflict. His current work focuses on conditions supporting our lives that are tacit, background, invisible, or resist attention: infrastructure, systems, norms, and the seemingly technical. His recent published work has focused on the role of capitalism and biometrics in border security, and the installation of temporary security bollards as part of urban securitisation strategies. His upcoming work on border security is now focusing on cross-border movements, ICT, and emerging trends, focusing especially on biometrics, logistical thinking, and the dominance of the human by the nonhuman with the rise of automation and AIs. 

His work for broader publics has focused on ways of driving cultural change through primary prevention-inspired approaches to the road toll, especially pedestrians and cyclists in crowded urban spaces. Following this, his primary focus in the coming years is a co-authored book examining the deeper roots of conflict between motorists and cyclists, which thinks through the ways social change is marked and marred by cultural conflict, as well as how justice and vulnerability are understood and experienced by different groups as we try, imperfectly, to live with one another.