The Information Security Department is home to a wide range of research focusing on the protection and wellbeing of people in digitally-mediated contexts. Our people and society research practices include participatory and speculative design and ethnography as well as developing collaborative engagements across a wide range of disciplines. Groups within this theme include:
- Ethnography Group
- Interdisciplinary Security Collective
Ethnography Group
The Ethnography Group at Royal Holloway, University of London was established in September 2022 by researchers in the Information Security Group. Most of us come from academic fields outside information security, including social and cultural anthropology, human and cultural geography, sociology, media and communication studies and critical criminology.
Information security is concerned with securing information – and that which depends on it – from adversaries. Information security is thus a field centrally concerned with conflict, of protecting one interest against the other. Members of the Ethnography Group use ethnographic methods of inquiry to research distinct sites of conflicting interests as a way to understand information security needs and practices held among groups with no institutional representation. This includes research with domestic workers, single-household families on the poverty edge, `data-driven’ policing networks, mobile workforces, protesters, populations in post-conflict contexts, environmental and human-rights activists, to mention a few. Our focus is thus on groups that are under-represented in information security research and concerns the information security needs of people who interact with institutions, while not the institutions themselves.
Interdisciplinary Security Collective
The Interdisciplinary Security Collective (ISC) is a newly-formed hub enabling individuals to come together to collectively explore how (cyber)security, privacy and safety may be understood in socio-technical, cultural, behavioural, and political formations across RHUL and beyond. The ISG is home to many interdisciplinary security research activities and the collective offers a platform to showcase these activities and promote collaboration and interactions between them. The ISC is currently under development but as it forms, research themes will be presented as clusters and active clusters will be promoted on the ISC’s website. The ISC also acts as a platform to organise and run interdisciplinary security events, many of them external facing, such as workshops, talks, and seminars. The ISC is currently developing a programme of regular internal events including walk and talk sessions, writing retreats, and skills building workshops.
