Towards a Typology of Interdisciplinarity in Cybersecurity:Trade, Choice, and Agnostic-Antagonist

Cybersecurity research increasingly involves non-engineering disciplines, such as psychology, social science and law [41]. In this paper, we argue that cybersecurity research is not only reshaped through new methods and concepts of these adjacent fields, but also through shared interdisciplinary practices. Existing literature on interdisciplinarity in cybersecurity is primarily concerned with defining ideal models that are based on ideals, rather than in empirical research of how interdisciplinarity is formed in practice. We offer an ethnographic analysis of interdisciplinary formats based on our four-year participation in the ongoing interdisciplinary cybersecurity PhD programme SecHuman at the Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany. The PhD programme brings together engineers, social scientists as well as humanities scholars. Drawing on methods and literature of ethnographic science and technology studies (STS), we attend to eight different interdisciplinary formats and analyse how they shape cybersecurity research: its logics of accountability, of innovation, and of ontology [3]. This leads to a typology of five modes of interdisciplinarity that can be found in the PhD programme: 1. choice, 2. subordinate-service, 3. integrative-synthetic, 4. trading, and 5. agonistic-antagonistic. Based on our empirical findings, we discuss how each mode shapes cybersecurity, and conclude with suggestions of how to craft interdisciplinary formats in the field

Care in Cybersecurity and Teleinfrastructure - Telling comparative stories about infrastructural breakdown across Greenland and Denmark

Care lives in the here-and-now material tinkering. Caring also evokes an moral stance that emerges from such tinkering rather than abstract ideals. Our presentation takes a comparative approach in weaving together, and setting apart, different modes of caring for infrastructural breakdown across two fieldsites. In our fieldsite in Denmark, cybersecurity has become an increasing concern that governmental agencies hope to tackle by better educating and informing citizens and small and medium-sized companies (SMEs). Although with best intentions, this has caused uncomfortable knowledge for companies that must rely on outdated machines and informal security practices. Care subverts formal recommendations to keep SMEs afloat. Reckoning with an everyday characterised by various telecommunication disruptions, tactics across our fieldsites in Greenland include individual preparation (cash and a battery-powered radio in the closet, etc.), but also dismissal and renegotiation of what counts as breakdown or disruption. Care, understood as a pragmatic and moral stance towards infrastructural breakdown, can become stigmatised across this vast and uneven infrastructure.The comparative approach to caring practices allows us to draw together the situated relations of the two fieldsites: How does care for infrastructural breakdown set them apart, partially connect, disrupt, or entangle them anew? And, how to further conceptualise care through the lens of comparison? <br/