New Year updates - thesis

Its been a while since I posted here, and a fairly busy time too. Finished up the corrections on the thesis, had them off for proofreading, and then they were handed back to Dr David Stevens, my internal examiner at Nottingham (co-author of the rather good Inequality.com). Finished a draft of the Terrorism literature review for RE-DESIGN, and managed to fit in a holiday over Christmas. 

Thesis - I had a number of things to do to the thesis to answer questions raised by the examiners. Chief among these was to provide a summary of science and technology studies, especially as this feeds into surveillance. I think this was missing because I started to engage with this field towards the end of the project, and even after submission (and it needed to go in the literature review chapter, which was one of the first written. I'm a member of EASST now, and have been since they offered a reduced rate for the conference in the netherlands. This involved reading some rather good stuff, including Simon Cole's Suspect Identities. 

I also expanded the deleuzian element of the thesis, specifically the idea of the collective assemblage of enunciation, the discursive element that complements 'machinic' assemblages in Deleuze and Guattari's 'A Thousand Plateaus' but is missing in Haggerty and Ericson's use of assemblages in The Surveillant Assemblage. This theoretical point makes a good argument for the importance of using discourse analysis to look at the way that surveillant assemblages are constructed and held together through language and communication. 

I dropped a number of policy proposals from the thesis. I still beleive in all of these, but it was pointed out in the viva that they didn't necessarily follow from the findings of the thesis, more from a general take on surveillance and information policy. 

Anyway, thats back with the internal examiner, and we'll see if the changes are ok, and if so, i'll be recommended to the registry for the awarding of the PhD.