David Barnard-Wills

UK NEWS MEDIA DISCOURSES OF SURVEILLANCE

This article examines the findings of a discursive analysis of UK newspapers to determine how practices of surveillance are represented. Drawing upon Deleuze and Guattari, the article argues for the importance of examining the linguistic and enunciative components of surveillant assemblages. The article shows how representations of surveillance practices in the UK media are split between two evaluative schemas. One is a discourse of appropriate surveillance, which draws upon discourses of crime prevention, counterterrorism, and national security. The second is a discourse of inappropriate surveillance that draws upon discourses of privacy, Big Brother, and personal liberty.

Securing Virtual Space Cyber War, Cyber Terror, and Risk

This article uses a governmentality and discourse analysis approach to analyze cyber security policy literature. It examines the problems of construction of virtual space and current efforts to secure this space political and technologically. It extracts a model of cyber security discourse that constructs cyberspace as ungovernable, unknowable, a cause of vulnerability, inevitably threatening, and a home to threatening actors.

E-safety education: Young people, surveillance and responsibility

This article presents the findings of an analysis of ‘e-safety’ education material currently made available to UK schools, and currently being delivered to children and young people between the ages of five and 18. E-safety refers to the way that young people are taught about risks online, how they can protect themselves, and to whom they should report worrying activity. The article is grounded in a political understanding of education as a political strategy, and one that is conducted by multiple actors, including policing agencies. The article therefore relates e-safety education to a broader politics of surveillance, crime prevention and governmental rationalities and techniques. Formal education does not determine, but likely influences the perceptions of young people towards the digitally mediated environment – including roles of authority, appropriate behavioural norms and risk perception (currently dominated by the threat of child sexual abuse). The most commonly used and disseminated e-safety education material is that produced by the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre. This article examines the role of a policing agency in delivering education, one that also functions as an agent of digitally mediated surveillance in its law enforcement functions. Education is an explicit strategy of political actors involved in the politics of digitally mediated surveillance.

Playing with Privacy: Games for Education and Communication in the Politics of Online Privacy:

Using the politics of personal information and online privacy as a case study, this article sets out the justification for the use of games in the education and communication of online privacy issues. It draws upon existing research into privacy knowledge and behaviour, game design for education and the experience of the Visualisation and Other Methods of Expression (VOME) project in designing a privacy education game.

The terrorism of the other: towards a contrapuntal reading of terrorism in India

This article advances an argument for a contrapuntal reading of terrorism using the case study of India. In recent years, the work of Edward Said has received some attention in the field of international relations. As yet, however, most readings of terrorism, either in its traditional form of terrorism studies or in the guise of critical terrorism studies, have not addressed the interface between terrorism and security, drawing on the work of Said. We take his work as a point of departure, enabling the analysis in this article to critique the ‘clash of civilisations’ thesis whilst also exploring the relationship between mass casualty terrorism and crowded places. In doing so, we draw attention to the instantiation of a series of attacks in India. The final section of this article pulls the analysis together so as to question the relationship between poverty and resilience.

The future of privacy certification in Europe: an exploration of options under article 42 of the GDPR

The EU faces substantive legislative reform in data protection, specifically in the form of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). One of the new elements in the GDPR is its call to establish data protection certification mechanisms, data protection seals and marks to help enhance transparency and compliance with the Regulation and allow data subjects to quickly assess the level of data protection of relevant products and services. To this effect, it is necessary to review privacy and data protection seals afresh and determine how data protection certification mechanisms, seals or marks might work given the role they will be called to play, particularly in Europe, in facilitating data protection. This article reviews the current state of play of privacy seals, the EU policy and regulatory thrusts for privacy and data protection certification, and the GDPR provisions on certification of the processing of personal data. The GDPR leaves substantial room for various options on data protection certification, which might play out in various ways, some of which are explored in this article.

Book review: Patricia L Dunmire, Projecting the Future through Political Discourse: The Case of the Bush Doctrine:

While I praise the authors for bringing us such immensely insightful discussions, I have two reservations for future editions of the book. First, there are some inconsistencies in the References which need to be taken care of by the authors. For example, on page 149, one of the references to Blommaert should be changed from The Sociology of Globalization to The Sociolinguistics of Globalization. Second, it would be wise to discuss the views expressed by those living in the so-called periphery when writing about, say, ELT textbooks and the amount of cultural load. Several studies have been conducted to date examining the views of teachers on ELT materials. Such studies could have been used to boost some of the arguments presented throughout the book (see e.g. Zarei and Khalessi, 2010). All in all, Neoliberalism and Applied Linguistics is a very substantial volume. I highly recommend the book to both undergraduate and postgraduate students as well as to researchers in applied linguistics. Further to this, the book is a welcome addition to the literature on language teacher education.