The Centre for Doctoral Training in Cyber Security for the Everyday at Royal Holloway seeks to recruit a PhD student who will explore cyber (in)securities of the 'smart home' from a feminist perspective.
The project will investigate the contemporary home as a key site for everyday engagement with technologies associated with the 'smart home', including IoT and networked devices controlling, for example, lighting, heating, energy, domestic appliances, access control, and audio-visual. The project will focus on the booming 'smart home' industry and lived (in)security experiences of its capturing and remaking of domestic life in various guises. It could be grounded in feminist human-computer interactions (HCI), security scholarship, feminist geography, and/or feminist geopolitics, and will draw on notions of intimacy, identity, and the everyday.
Foci could include:
- Critically reworking threat modelling in the 'smart home' and cyber security more widely as an embodied process through which security threats and vulnerabilities are identified and addressed;
- Sensory, emotional, and affective experiences of living with smart devices;
- Gendered technologically-facilitated domestic violence and sexual abuse in the home (e.g. via spyware ecosystem);
- Automated futures of social reproduction and care in the 'smart home';
- 'Smart home' seductions and commercial cultures of homemaking.
We seek applicants with an interest in cyber-security but come from a social science or humanities discipline, with at least an undergraduate degree in a field cognate to Human Geography; Politics and IR; Sociology; Criminology; Science and Technology Studies; Social Studies of Health or Medicine, or the Medical or Digital Humanities. Ideally, applicants will have experience in the collection, handling and ethical treatment of qualitative data, and experience of research methodologies such as ethnography and participant observation, semi-structured interviews, policy and documentary analysis.
Prospective applicants are welcome to discuss with Prof Katherine Brickell (Katherine.Brickell@rhul.ac.uk) and Dr Jorge Blasco Alis (Jorge.BlascoAlis@rhul.ac.uk).
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