Mending the commons with the ‘Little Mesters’

The subjects of this paper are the ‘Little Mesters’ of Sheffield, UK. The Mesters are self-employed master craftspeople whose day-to-day work is dependent on repairing, recycling, and maintenance, in ways that are intertwined with the urban fabric, flows of goods, and collaborative manufacturing spanning generations. This long-established, yet fragile web of mutuality and reciprocal practices of repair by highly-skilled workers is under threat from enclosure, and yet, I argue, simultaneously offers possibilities for reclaiming the commons. Through collaborative mapping and activist work with a campaign group over eight years, I examine an instance of existential threat to a factory, Portland Works, home to Little Mesters. Through strategies of distributed design prompted by this threat, cultures and practices of repair have been harnessed, and repair has become politicised, dispersed and future-orientated, prefiguring the post-capitalist city. The enclosure of commons is particularly spatial and material, and therefore disruptive of certain more egalitarian forms of relating and organising; politically, economically, pedagogically and ecologically. I argue that practices of repair found in this instance offer possibilities to address such ruptures, through the ethical decisions they prompt, the assemblages they generate, or gestures of care they manifest. Repair is often conceptualised temporally, as an activity that returns something to a former state, yet I wish to assert its spatial and material agencies; as productive of spaces and relations, dependent on them, and potentially restorative of them. In doing so I claim its value to support the reclaiming of ‘common failures’, the amplification of existing instances of commoning, and the development of heterogeneous networks of commoners

The Computer Misuse Act 1990 to support vulnerability research? Proposal for a defence for hacking as a strategy in the fight against cybercrime.

Despite the recent push towards security by design, most softwares and hardwares on the market still include numerous vulnerabilities, i.e. flaws or weaknesses whose discovery and exploitation by criminal hackers compromise the security of the networked and information systems, affecting millions of users, as acknowledged by the 2016 UK Government in its Cybersecurity Strategy. Conversely, when security researchers find and timely disclose vulnerabilities to vendors who supply the IT products or who provide a service dependent on the IT products, they increase the opportunities for vendors to remove the vulnerabilities and close the security gap. They thus significantly contribute to the fight against cybercrime and, more widely, to the management of the digital security risk. However, in 2015, the European Network and Information Security Agency concluded that the threat of prosecution under EU and US computer misuse legislations ‘can have a chilling effect’, with security researchers ‘discentivise[d]’ to find vulnerabilities. Taking stock of these significant, but substantially understudied, criminal law challenges that these security researchers face in the UK when working independently, without the vendors’ prior authorisation, this paper proposes a new defence to the offences under the Computer Misuse Act, an innovative solution to be built in light of both the scientific literature on vulnerability research and the exemption proposals envisaged prior to the Computer Misuse Act 1990. This paper argues that a defence would allow security researchers, if prosecuted, to demonstrate that contrary to criminal hackers, they acted in the public interest and proportionally

Fixing the Gap: an investigation into wheelchair users' shaping of London public transport

Public transport in London is a massive infrastructure, with over 400km of underground tracks, a fleet of 8000 buses and a rich, 153-year history that has turned it into a symbol of the English capital. Despite its size, accessibility in this infrastructure has been a source of concern for wheelchair users in London. Based on interpretative analysis of thirty-four in-depth qualitative interviews with wheelchair users and policy-makers, observations of training courses and documentary data on London transport, this research asks, “How do wheelchair users use public transport in London?” This thesis, which sits at the intersection of science and technology studies (STS) and disability studies, has two main arguments. The first contends that the barriers faced by wheelchair users in transport are the result of infrastructural stabilisation that occurred in a period of social segregation (1850s-1950s). This is discussed by intersecting the history of transport in London, with that of disabled people in British society, followed by interviewees’ accounts of the barriers they encounter in the infrastructure to this day. The second argument holds that, despite segregation, wheelchair users have taken an active role in the process of shaping transport in London. In this role, they have developed inclusion mechanisms on both micro- and macro-scales, through individual problem-solving on the one hand and collective and political activism on the other. Drawing from STS concepts like the social shaping of technology and infrastructural invisibility, and engaging with the social model of disability from disability studies, this thesis shows the impact of marginalised users’ engagement. It concludes that the social perception of disabled users as ‘passive’ masks an active interaction with and shaping of the transport network. This thesis therefore provides insights into the paradoxical nature of infrastructure, showing places of agency where previously one saw passivity and exclusion