Technology, Thoughts, and Trinkets

Welcome to my digital presence on the web! This webpage, and its associated projects, are part of a continuing effort to maintain a public digital image, while simultaneously creating a hub for my ongoing public projects.

I am a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of Victoria. My research interests focus on how privacy (particularly informational privacy, expressive privacy and accessibility privacy) is affected by digitally mediated surveillance, and the normative implications that such surveillance has in (and on) contemporary Western political systems. I’m currently attending to a particular set of technologies that facilitate digitally mediated surveillance, including Deep Packet Inspection (DPI), behavioral advertising, and radio frequency identification. I try to think though how these technologies influence citizens in their decision to openly express themselves or engage in self-censoring behavior on a regular basis.

Somewhat more broadly, my academic and personal interests entwine with philosophical and political projects that attend to privacy, citizenship, technology, surveillance, globalization, copyright, and cosmopolitanism. In digitizing some of my investigations, ruminations, and critiques about these (and miscellaneous other) topics, I am ‘learning by doing’. This follows from my position that academics should contribute to the public sphere; publicly exhibiting (and welcoming comment on) my thoughts in this digital space is a practical instantiation of that belief.

Any ideas or thoughts that I write here should be attributed to me (save for comments made by other participants in this space), and do not necessarily represent the groups I work with, or the businesses that I am employed by. No one has compelled me to write any of the text that appears on this site. No sponsors have paid me to write about any of their products.

Unless otherwise noted, all work that is posed here is licensed under a Creative Commons (3.0) Attribution, Non-Commercial, ShareAlike license.