Summary

I am a Teaching Fellow in International Security based at RAF College Cranwell, working as part of the Portsmouth Military Education team (PME).

My PhD thesis took an in-depth critical look at cybersecurity politics in the United States. Despite its prominence in security discourses and policies in the United States, what counts as ‘cybersecurity’ and how it is to be practised by state actors is still a matter of ongoing contention. By deploying the analytical framework of ‘boundary work’ from Science and Technology Studies (STS), I argued that what cybersecurity ‘is,’ and how its boundaries are drawn, are not overdetermined by strategic or technological imperatives, so much as they reflect the efforts of different entities to defend and extend their own organisational and symbolic boundaries.  As my thesis found, this approach opened up critical questions over the extent to which security imaginaries and conceptions of US national identity work as important codes of intelligibility in (and transformed through) cybersecurity politics over time, finding that technologies, consequential categories, institutional responsibilities, political authority, and national identity are also constituted and challenged in and through these debates.

As well as exploring cybersecurity politics in other contexts and settings, my current reasearch is also looking at the role that time and temporality plays in government secrecy and is also examining what emerging conceptions of 'cyber power,' and its strategic implications, mean for the UK.

Research interests

I am interested in research that takes a critical and reflexive approach to matters of security, and that questions commonplace assumptions about cybersecurity at the international and national security levels. My research is interdiscplinary in nature, sitting at the intersections between critical security studies, International Relations, STS, sociology and politics.

My current research interests include:

- Cybersecurity politics: how it is contested and fought over between state actors, their bureaucracies and agencies and with those outside of governments.

- Cyber Power: while the UK government has recently declared its intent to be 'a democratic and responsible cyber power', there is still a lot of doctrinal and strategic work to be done in clarifying what this means in practice.

- Sociological approaches to technologies and scientific knowledge

- Secrecy Studies and critical approaches to how knowledge is made and unmade in global politics

I am happy to receive informal enquiries relating to doctoral degree (Ph.D) supervision in the areas of International Relations, Security Studies and also sociological approaches technology and scientific knowledge such as Science and Technology Studies.