Description
Recent years have witnessed a ‘vernacular turn’ in critical security studies centred on the construction and functions of security speak in everyday contexts. In this article, I seek to push this turn forward by arguing for greater attention to the role of numerical claims and other quantitative rhetoric in non-elite discourse on security threats and responses. Doing so, I suggest, deepens understanding of the mechanisms and registers through which (in)securities are constructed in the vernacular, while providing important opportunity to strengthen this research through engagement with insight from literature on the rhetorical, sociological, and political functions of numbers. To illustrate this claim, I apply a new methodological framework to original data generated from a series of focus groups on (counter-)radicalisation. Doing so, I argue, demonstrates the importance of numbers for vernacular constructions of threat, evaluation of security policies, contestation of dominant security discourses, and depictions of public awareness.
