This paper presents an analysis of recent transformations in cyber security assurance, a field of evaluation that aims to establish whether technical products are secure. I work from a set of narratives about problems with assurance, drawn from interviews with practitioners based in the UK. I focus on characterisation: the stories practitioners tell, the cast of characters that populate them, and how such stories act to problematise the domain. Mistrust, it is argued, can be understood in terms of the capacities of sceptical narratives to efface the power of security certifications to be taken on ‘face value.’ A text-based view of mistrust is thus developed that can be differentiated from the conventional disposition-centred view. Examining mistrust, then, leads us to ask not how to change dispositions to make them ‘more trusting,’ but rather to critical questions about the palette of characters that feature in cyber security. I close the essay by offering a commentary on the way characterisation leads to the anticipation of experts in formulations of policy and on the possible ‘counter-characterisation’ that might be developed, for instance around ‘caring’ characters. 

The one vs. the many : minor characters and the space of the protagonist in the novel

Characterising assurance: scepticism and mistrust in cyber security

/pdf/depressive-realism-readings-in-the-victorian-novel-2c1zvh3jcd.pdf

Depressive Realism: Readings in the Victorian Novel

/pdf/introducing-a-quiet-period-srlzdzbz.pdf

Introducing a Quiet Period

Research shows that teachers and education are often represented negatively or stereotypically in popular and literary culture, both in the Dutch language area and in Anglophone contexts. Regarding contemporary Dutch literature, though, research on educational representations has until now focussed on small corpora of novels that explicitly deal with education. In this article, we explore the representations of teachers and education in a much larger and broader corpus: the 170 submissions to the bulk list of the prestigious Dutch Libris Literatuurprijs of 2013. We provide a Keyword in Context Analysis of 292 educational representations in this corpus and offer a demographic analysis of the 71 teachers who inhabit the novels under analysis. In doing so, we show that educational representations and teacher characters are relatively common in contemporary Dutch language novels. Our analysis also reveals that literary representations of teachers are predominantly negative in nature, especially regarding their behaviour towards students, their external presentation, and their pedagogical skills. Representations of education in general tend to be even more negative. In that sense, literary representations of education appear to converge with the negative public appeal of the educational sector in the contemporary Low Countries. [193/200] 

The one vs. the many : minor characters and the space of the protagonist in the novel

Citations

Characterising assurance: scepticism and mistrust in cyber security

Depressive Realism: Readings in the Victorian Novel

Introducing a Quiet Period

“The problem with all those teachers is that they are completely numb”: Representations of Teachers and Education in Recent Dutch Novels

Bibliography

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