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a_cubedTL;DR: New paper accepted for publication mixing my personal passion for SF with my academic work on the social, legal and ethical implications of technology in societal security.
In 2015 I went to a workshop about Surveillance in Kingston, ON, CA. One of the other presenters was a film studies PhD student presenting about surveillance in The Dark Knight. Being a bit of a Batman fan I had an enjoyable engagement with him after his presentation and later during the conference less formally. This led to an idea to work together and he has come to visit our research centre a number of times (he's in Tokyo now on his latest visit, though it's about to finish). After some discussions around things we decided that it would be interesting to look at Superhero movies and episodic shows (I don't think we can call them television since they're no longer broadcast so much as streamed or downloaded) and how they represent analogies for security policy issues.
I recommended that Bruce Schneier invite Fareed to the Security and Human Behavior conference in 2016 and mentioned the work we were planning to do. As I'd hoped, Bruce expressed interest in the idea and so Fareed and I met Bruce just before the conference where we explained that idea. Bruce was initially intrigued but unsure of how to work together with a humanities scholar. I clinched his involvement with us with the observation that what Film Studies scholars do is not that different to scientists and engineers. We each work with data, it's just that the data they start with is the details in movies and TV (and books and comics and visual art). Over the following two years we look at Batman V Superman (Bruce: "My god, that was a terrible movie." AAA: "Yes, but it provides us with some good data nevertheless."), Captain America: Civil War and Daredevil (Season 2), using their framing of hero battling hero to explore various aspects of the relationships between power, accountability, authority, law and morals.
Writing the paper turned out to be a significant challenge. We are breaking new grounds here, so far as we can tell, in using the methods of the humanities (close reading) of aesthetic texts, applied to social science questions (security policy) surrounding the social, legal and ethical impacts of science/engineering (drones, body scanners, surveillance , AI). We also had to explain concisely how the close reading method works, to find that for such a seminal aspect of humanities work that there really are very few decent methodological guides and a very sparse nomenclature for talking about it. We finally completed this in late 2018 and submitted it to "Security Journal". The editor (whom we'd checked with before submission that they would be interested in considering it for publication) got some mixed reviews back to us in February. He was very patient when the original deadline for revisions on end May passed. We finally got the revisions in recently and we got the paper accepted today. On previous experience with that journal, the "online first" citable appearance with a DoI will come later this year (maybe early next year) but the volume and issue might not be allocated until 2021. Still, it can be noted on my CV as "in press" and cited formally as soon as the DoI is allocated.
Fareed and I (and my colleague Prof Murata) are now working away on two or three other joint projects. One or two on Surveillance Capitalism, another on AI, while Fareed is about to start as a tenure-track academic at Texas Tech.
In 2015 I went to a workshop about Surveillance in Kingston, ON, CA. One of the other presenters was a film studies PhD student presenting about surveillance in The Dark Knight. Being a bit of a Batman fan I had an enjoyable engagement with him after his presentation and later during the conference less formally. This led to an idea to work together and he has come to visit our research centre a number of times (he's in Tokyo now on his latest visit, though it's about to finish). After some discussions around things we decided that it would be interesting to look at Superhero movies and episodic shows (I don't think we can call them television since they're no longer broadcast so much as streamed or downloaded) and how they represent analogies for security policy issues.
I recommended that Bruce Schneier invite Fareed to the Security and Human Behavior conference in 2016 and mentioned the work we were planning to do. As I'd hoped, Bruce expressed interest in the idea and so Fareed and I met Bruce just before the conference where we explained that idea. Bruce was initially intrigued but unsure of how to work together with a humanities scholar. I clinched his involvement with us with the observation that what Film Studies scholars do is not that different to scientists and engineers. We each work with data, it's just that the data they start with is the details in movies and TV (and books and comics and visual art). Over the following two years we look at Batman V Superman (Bruce: "My god, that was a terrible movie." AAA: "Yes, but it provides us with some good data nevertheless."), Captain America: Civil War and Daredevil (Season 2), using their framing of hero battling hero to explore various aspects of the relationships between power, accountability, authority, law and morals.
Writing the paper turned out to be a significant challenge. We are breaking new grounds here, so far as we can tell, in using the methods of the humanities (close reading) of aesthetic texts, applied to social science questions (security policy) surrounding the social, legal and ethical impacts of science/engineering (drones, body scanners, surveillance , AI). We also had to explain concisely how the close reading method works, to find that for such a seminal aspect of humanities work that there really are very few decent methodological guides and a very sparse nomenclature for talking about it. We finally completed this in late 2018 and submitted it to "Security Journal". The editor (whom we'd checked with before submission that they would be interested in considering it for publication) got some mixed reviews back to us in February. He was very patient when the original deadline for revisions on end May passed. We finally got the revisions in recently and we got the paper accepted today. On previous experience with that journal, the "online first" citable appearance with a DoI will come later this year (maybe early next year) but the volume and issue might not be allocated until 2021. Still, it can be noted on my CV as "in press" and cited formally as soon as the DoI is allocated.
Fareed and I (and my colleague Prof Murata) are now working away on two or three other joint projects. One or two on Surveillance Capitalism, another on AI, while Fareed is about to start as a tenure-track academic at Texas Tech.
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Date: 2019-08-08 12:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-08-08 01:33 pm (UTC)For anyone else interested, the author text is available from my web page.
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Date: 2019-08-08 03:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-08-08 11:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-08-09 10:39 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-08-10 04:41 am (UTC)