Social and Behavioral Sciences | Open Access Articles

(Not) Accessing The Castle: Grappling With Secrecy In Research On Security Practices, Lilly P. Muller, Natalie Welfens Aug 2023

(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 …

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Today’S Fake News Is Tomorrow’S Fake History: How Us History Textbooks Mirror Corporate News Media Narratives, Nolan Higdon, Mickey Huff, Jen Lyons Jan 2021

Today’S Fake News Is Tomorrow’S Fake History: How Us History Textbooks Mirror Corporate News Media Narratives, Nolan Higdon, Mickey Huff, Jen Lyons

Secrecy and Society

The main thrust of this study is to assess how the systematic biases found in mass media journalism affect the writing of history textbooks. There has been little attention paid to how the dissemination of select news information regarding the recent past, particularly from the 1990s through the War on Terror, influences the ways in which US history is taught in schools. This study employs a critical-historical lens with a media ecology framework to compare Project Censored’s annual list of censored and under-reported stories to the leading and most adopted high school and college US history textbooks. The findings reveal …

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Historical Amnesia: British And U.S. Intelligence, Past And Present, Calder Walton Sep 2018

Historical Amnesia: British And U.S. Intelligence, Past And Present, Calder Walton

Secrecy and Society

Many intelligence scandals in the news today seem unprecedented - from Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. Presidential election, to British and U.S. intelligence agencies monitoring activities of their citizens. They seem new largely because, traditionally, intelligence agencies on both sides of the Atlantic were excessively secretive about their past activities: even the names “GCHQ” and “NSA” were airbrushed from declassified records, and thus missing from major historical works and scholarship on on post-war international relations. The resulting secrecy about British and U.S. intelligence has led to misunderstandings and conspiracy theories in societies about them. Newly opened secret records now …

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Secrecy And Intelligence: Introduction, Kathleen Vogel, Brian Balmer Sep 2018

Secrecy And Intelligence: Introduction, Kathleen Vogel, Brian Balmer

Secrecy and Society

The catalyst for this special issue of Secrecy and Society stems from a workshop titled “Secrecy and Intelligence: Opening the Black Box” at North Carolina State University, April, 2016. This workshop brought together interested scholars, intelligence practitioners, and civil society members from the United States and Europe to discuss how different facets of secrecy and other practices shape the production of knowledge in intelligence work. This dialogue aimed to be reflective on how the closed social worlds of intelligence shape what intelligence actors and intelligence analysts, who include those within the intelligence establishment and those on the outside, know about …

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Secrecy, Democracy And War: A Review, Brian Martin Nov 2016