It’s that time of year again, where I put together a post telling anyone who is interested why doing a PhD in information security with a grounding in qualitative social science, particularly ethnography, is super cool. This year is no different, but let me start with the practical stuff. We are currently accepting applications to Royal Holloway’s Centre for Doctoral Training (CDT) in Cyber Security for the Everyday. We have 10 fully funded PhD positions that are all related to information security, in the broadest understanding of the term.

Some of us in the Information Security Group at Royal Holloway University of London did a thing; we created the Ethnography Group to, in a slightly more formal way, bring together and make visible our ethnographic work. Our intention is to create a hub - a home - for those of us working at the intersections of ethnography and information security, with a particular focus on the security needs and practices of populations that are under-represented in information security research.

We are currently accepting applications to Royal Holloway’s Centre for Doctoral Training (CDT) in Cyber Security for the Everyday. We have 10 fully funded PhD positions that all centre on information security, in the broadest understanding of the term. This includes research grounded in the social sciences. For information about the research carried out by past and current CDT students - as well as details about the CDT programme - check out the CDT website.

I have unashamedly stolen the idea for this post (and some of the sentences!) from my colleague Martin Albrecht’s blog. We are recruiting two lecturers in the Information Security Group (ISG) at Royal Holloway University of London; in all areas of information security, including qualitative social sciences. These are full-time, permanent research and teaching positions and the deadline is 31 October 2021. Why should you apply? Well, let me do a pitch as a qualitative social scientist in the ISG.

Together with Nicola Wendt, I wrote this piece on how ethnography can contribute to information security, which appeared in the ISG Newsletter 2020/2021. An emerging body of information security scholarship has explored the security needs and practices of distinct groups of people, often focusing on those who are either marginalised or at higher security risk, e.g. activists, refugees, undocumented migrants. What these works highlight, among other things, is that information security relies as much on people’s experiences of security in their interactions with technology as on the security of the technology itself.