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Full-Text Articles in Science and Technology Studies
(Not) Accessing The Castle: Grappling With Secrecy In Research On Security Practices, Lilly P. Muller, Natalie Welfens
(Not) Accessing The Castle: Grappling With Secrecy In Research On Security Practices, Lilly P. Muller, Natalie Welfens
Secrecy and Society
This article discusses how to deal with secrecy and limited access in ethnographically inspired research of security fields. Drawing inspiration from recent debates about secrecy in Critical Security Research and from Franz Kafka’s The Castle, we propose to treat access limitations and the secrecy we encounter as methodological tools that provide insights into social relations and power structures of security fields. We develop the argument in two steps. First, we argue for a more fine-grained taxonomy of secrecy, that allows to distinguish between mystery, concealment and the relational dimension of secrecy. Second, we apply the taxonomy to our respective …
Technologies And Time Tempers: How Things Mediate A State’S (Cyber Vulnerability) Disclosure Practices, Clare Stevens
Technologies And Time Tempers: How Things Mediate A State’S (Cyber Vulnerability) Disclosure Practices, Clare Stevens
Secrecy and Society
State secrecy and disclosure practices are often treated as processes of intentional and strategic human agency, and as forms of political time management (Bok 1982; Horn 2011). Through a critical analysis of the United States government’s disclosure practices in the context of their discourse around the cybersecurity “Vulnerabilities Equities Process” (VEP), this paper will present a two-fold argument against these conventional treatments of secrecy and disclosure. While government secrecy and disclosure can certainly be understood as a form of (agential) timing, orientation and control (Hom 2018), this paper will also show how government secrecy practices are emergent at the point …
Introduction To The Special Issue On Secrecy And Technologies, Clare Stevens, Sam Forsythe
Introduction To The Special Issue On Secrecy And Technologies, Clare Stevens, Sam Forsythe
Secrecy and Society
Many scholars have treated the inscrutability of technologies, secrecy, and other unknowns as moral and ethical challenges that can be resolved through transparency and openness. This paper, and the special issue it introduces, instead wants to explore how we can understand the productive, strategic but also emancipatory potential of secrecy and ignorance in the development of security and technologies. This paper argues that rather than just being mediums or passive substrates, technologies are making a difference to how secrecy, disclosure, and transparency work. This special issue will show how technologies and time mediate secrecy and disclosure, and vice versa. This …