The internet: a framework for understanding ethical issues.

The impact and influence of the Internet as a communications medium cannot be overstated. It has had a profound effect on economic, political, and other social infrastructures, and has introduced ways of communicating which have transformed social relationships. The Internet has opened up information exchange on a global scale, offering enormous opportunities and advantages to an hitherto unknown degree. The Internet has also raised a number of serious, and urgent, ethical challenges. The discussions and debate surrounding ethical issues such as trust, security and privacy, amongst others, conducted at all levels (international, government, academia and the popular press) in themselves are evidence of the complexity of the problem of Internet ethics. The research unravels some of the complexity and muddle of Internet ethics, with the objective of providing a foundation for further research. This thesis offers four perspectives on the problems of Internet ethics: technical, conceptual, regulatory and ethical. These different viewpoints are not only useful in drawing out insights concerning the ethical framework of the Internet, they also provide leverage for the analysis of pertinent issues. The work in this thesis thus offers a framework for understanding, and analysis, which can be developed and used in continuing investigations. The research is a combination of theory and practice - both informing each other. The approach taken arose from the author's direct involvement in many of the expert discussions and debates which (together with the literature), identified a need for foundational work. In-depth work with a number of specialised groups has provided the practical backdrop, and grounding to this research - published results appear as Appendices

Negotiating Internet Governance

What is at stake for how the Internet continues to evolve is the preservation of its integrity as a single network. In practice, its governance is neither centralised nor unitary; it is piecemeal and fragmented, with authoritative decision-making coming from different sources simultaneously: governments, businesses, international organisations, technical and academic experts, and civil society. Historically, the conditions for their interaction were rarely defined beyond basic technical coordination, due at first to the academic freedom granted to the researchers developing the network and, later on, to the sheer impossibility of controlling mushrooming Internet initiatives. Today, the search for global norms and rules for the Internet continues, be it for cybersecurity or artificial intelligence, amid processes fostering the supremacy of national approaches or the vitality of a pluralist environment with various stakeholders represented. This book provides an incisive analysis of the emergence and evolution of global Internet governance, unpacking the complexity of more than 300 governance arrangements, influential debates and political negotiations over four decades. Highly accessible, this book breaks new ground through a wide empirical exploration and a new conceptual approach to governance enactment in global issue domains. A tripartite framework is employed for revealing power dynamics, relying on: a) an extensive database of mechanisms of governance for the Internet at the global and regional level; b) an in-depth analysis of the evolution of actors and priorities over time; and c) a key set of dominant practices observed in the Internet governance communities. It explains continuity and change in Internet-related negotiations, opening up new directions for thinking and acting in this field

Senate journal, 1 December 2004.

Titles and imprints vary; Some volumes include miscellaneous state documents and reports; Rules of the Senat

The Boundaries of the Public: Mediating Sex in Postwar Lebanon

This dissertation examines the mediation of non-normative genders and sexualities in contemporary Lebanese public culture since the end of the civil war in 1990. Through a critical analysis of television performances, literary texts, digital media productions, and narrative films and interviews with cultural producers, I demonstrate how media discourses on sexuality engender the public sphere through the construction and contestation of ideal masculinity and femininity. The confessional television talk shows, feminist films, and autobiographical digital and print queer publications collected here are genres that unsettle distinctions between the private and the public, the personal and the political. Through their circulation, these representations produce social discourses that reveal the centrality of sex and gender in the articulation of individual, collective, and national identities. They are public interfaces where the recognition and contestation of social difference unfolds, but they are also cultural artifacts that record and document the otherwise unspoken and invisible violence of normativity on dominated subjects. I conclude that processes of mediation shape the visibility of non-normative subjectivities and give cultural representations their social meaning, revealing what a repressed discourse on sexuality – one I characterize as infrapolitical – can tell us about the mechanics of power in society

Convivial Making: Power in Public Library Creative Places

In 2011, public libraries began to provide access to collaborative creative places, frequently called “makerspaces.” The professional literature portrays these as beneficial for communities and individuals through their support of creativity, innovation, learning, and access to high-tech tools such as 3D printers. As in longstanding “library faith” narratives, which pin the library’s existence to widely held values, makerspace rhetoric describes access to tools and skills as instrumental for a stronger economy or democracy, social justice, and/or individual happiness. The rhetoric generally frames these places as empowering. Yet the concept of power has been neither well-theorized within the library makerspace literature nor explored in previous studies. This study fills the gap between the rhetoric and the reality of power, as described by the stakeholders, including staff, trustees, and users of the library. Potentially, library creative places could be what Ivan Illich calls convivial tools: tools that manifest social relations involving equitable distributions of power and decision-making. A convivial tool ensures that users may decide to which end they would like to apply the tool, and thus are constitutive of human capabilities and social justice. However, the characterization of library makerspaces in the literature evokes a technologically deterministic entrepreneurialism that marginalizes many types of making, and reduces the power of individuals to choose the ends to which they put this tool. This multi-site ethnographic study seeks to unravel the currents of power within three public library creative places. Through participant observation, document analysis, and interviews, the study traces the mechanisms and processes by which power is distributed, as enacted by institutional practices—the spaces, policies, tools, and programs—or through individual practices. The study finds seven key tensions that coalesce around the concept of conviviality, and also reveals seven capabilities of convivial tools that the users and providers of these spaces identify as crucial to their successful and satisfying implementation. As a user-centered exploration of the interactions of power in a public institution, this study can benefit a range of organizations that aim to further inclusion, equity, and social justice

Beyond the Naughty Step: The intersections of class and gender in contemporary parenting culture

This thesis examines the texture of contemporary parenting culture, examining how 'childrearing', as the activity of raising children, has been rhetorically eclipsed by 'parenting', as a broader orientation towards one's children, oneself and the future. Parenting has been increasingly visualised across culture and policy as both a classless activity and as the key to transcending social inequalities of all kinds. In these visualisations, it is poor parenting which limits and constrains children. Consequently, good, competent or responsible parenting has become imbued cross a range of sites with enormous explanatory power, and is invoked to account for developmental differences in behaviour, vocabulary, and cognition. This thesis critically examines these socio-cultural shifts and explores how parenting discourse is implicated within these drifts away from a sociological imagining of inequality and towards a more psychological account of social change. It pays specific attention to one television programme, Supernanny (Richochet Productions, 2003-), which proved highly popular amongst viewers and highly tenacious in policy circles; a programme in which the staging of 'poor parenting' became an opportunity for Both education and entertainment. This thesis pays close attention to the subjectivising encounters between parenting culture and parents. It argues that, far from parenting being a classless activity, it has emerged as a new site for the production of social distinction

Holding space: friendship, care and carcerality in the UK immigration detention system

Friendship and care are important as ideas and practices for people navigating the asylum and immigration system in Britain, but are conditioned by the carceral space of the Immigration Removal Centre (IRC). Detention, as it most commonly known, operates here as a legal, temporal, and social ‘holding space’ that is manifested in the physical walls of the IRC, but points to wider experiences of liminality and carcerality. Based on 12 months’ of fieldwork with people going through the asylum system in Glasgow, along with several years of campaigning and organising, this thesis explores how people work through their ‘detainability’ and the relationships they form and maintain during this time, moving from the IRC itself, through people’s homes and into the wider ‘asylum dispersal’ city. Here, friendship and care are drawn upon as vital, if contested, categories for understanding relatedness, solidarity, and political action, ranging from the codified ‘humanitarian kinship’ of detention visiting groups, to the informal support practices people enact every day. Such processes are interwoven with deeply racialized and colonial histories of immigration law and border enforcement, which produce particular categories and spaces of ‘inside’ and ‘out’. Moving between the thresholds of such spaces can involve trying to discern what or who the Home Office and state are in ways that are charged with the threat of complicity, along with navigating medicalised notions of vulnerability and complex ideas of work and labour. Throughout, people ‘hold space’ for each other in different ways, finding collective ways to resist, refuse and live, beyond the crushing embrace of the UK immigration system

Privacy in Maternity Care Environments: Exploring Perspectives of Mothers, Midwives and Student Midwives

This thesis explores the concept of privacy in maternity care environments through the beliefs and perceptions of mothers (during pregnancy and after birth), student midwives and midwives. The study was designed in response to practice concerns raised by midwives and an increase in professional healthcare documentation, highlighting the need to maintain and enhance the privacy of patients. Literature reviewed showed a sparse understanding of the concept of privacy in relation to healthcare and highlighted disparity between subject disciplines' interpretations of privacy. A grounded theory methodology was used to explore participants' interpretation of privacy in relation to their experiences, thus interpreting it from the perspective of users of the service and healthcare professionals. Data collection methods included focus groups, interviews, and participant observation. Results show that mothers do have several areas of concern about privacy and base their perceptions of privacy on their ability to retain credibility as a mother when in the company of others and are linked to their perception of 'loss of face', whereas midwives consider mothers' privacy in relation to their perception of the environment as a place of employment Students' perceptions of privacy were based on their own prior personal experiences and their knowledge as soon-to-be midwives, seeing themselves as a voice for both mothers and midwives. Recommendations for practice are provided and a new practice based tool is designed with a view to helping midwives determine and address the privacy needs of mothers. The research concludes with recommendations for those involved in the provision and development of care for mothers and for subsequent research