danni naeil

Category: Decision point

  • And so it begins

    It’s time fot the big finale: the writing of the master’s thesis!

    Last year I tried to get a scholarship for data collection abroad. Unfortunately I didn’t, mainly because I study political science and not STEM (albeit, if I may say so myself, I study STS – science and technology studies).

    Many attempts were made to contact organizations and academics in Canada. After a while I managed to receive replies from people whom I could interview about mining, Indigenous peoples, land rights and critical minerals. After a video meeting with one person, I decided to pay for the journey to Canada myself.

    Why travel from Sweden to Canada just to interview a few people on these topics? I’ve been wanting to do it for several years. Besides, I didn’t want to read and write. I wanted more than that.

    The same week our course officially started, I traveled to Canada. Thus I could spend time there and get acquainted with the literature necessary for the literary review.

    Partly it felt weird and almost unjustified. I did get much information indeed, about the situation in Canada (and Sweden, since two of them had visited Sweden and written about Fennoscandia), but only during the last interview did we touch on a feasible topics I could write about: resistance to mines in previous mining-friendly municipalities.

  • Time to decide again

    It’s been two years and finally it’s time to study some more. In roughly one month, we’ll begin writing our bachelor thesis. Mine will (unless some pivotal change occurs) be about digital transnational repression in Sweden. There’s isn’t much research on this issue regarding Sweden. There’s scant research internationally too, except for Freedom House, The Citizen Lab and a few researchers specialized in the field, like Marcus Michaelsen. I’m about to dive into their research more thoroughly, choose my material wisely and formulate questions.

  • Idea accepted

    After many days of straying like a lost dog around the different ideas, I settled on one idea. I managed to narrow it down, from the fields of computational propaganda, information warfare, privacy and surveillance capitalism, to the core of many of them: personal data. What does the Swedish government write about personal data and processing (of personal data)? How does the government write about personal data and security? Is it my responsibility to keep personal data safe and secure, is it the government’s responsibility? And do they apply a gender perspective? What is the perspective on information security?

    May means a lot of writing on this issue. Thus the list of interesting and intriguing books grows longer and longer still. In summer I hope I’ll manage to write a little about some of them.

  • Time to decide

    I’ve reached the point in my education in political science where I have to choose. Choose a subject I wish to pursue. It can be anything. That’s not me however.

    Up until this point I’ve gathered lots of information on many different subjects I find interesting. Some are links to news, some from books, some from websites and some are student or doctoral thesises. All of a sudden I find myself unable to actually choose one subject, one political level and one method to focus on. Perhaps this is me, after all, having too many options.

    The different topics so far concern privacy, both personal and collective; weaponization of social media, especially against women; cybersecurity and feminism; computational propaganda and the nation state or the municipality; knowledge of personal data and GDPR among political parties; information/data wars between nation states; the introduction of 5G and cybersecurity dimensions of 5G on a municipal level; and, finally, the debate (or lack of debate) on surveillance equipment, such as Deep Packet Inspection (DPI), traffic intelligence or bulk intelligence gathering.

    Huh.