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.