Today was a horribly early start to get from London back up to Glasgow, but the four and a half hour train journey meant I got to finish off Cory Doctorow’s brilliant Little Brother, which I read in print, but you can download under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike license from here.
I presented at the BOBCATSSS Conference in Amsterdam last week (blog post forthcoming!), and a lot of privacy and data security issues were raised in other sessions there that caught my interest, so I’m really glad I read this because it’s a good (and genuinely riveting) introduction to some really important themes that I don’t know half enough about.
The rest of it looked mostly like this, just in my bedroom rather than the library:
I’m trying to find a hook for my research topic, but the more I read, the more lost I get. I’m hoping to tie something down a bit more over the next couple of weeks. My supervisor recommended this book because he thinks it might be a good idea for me to ground my research in a critical theory (here’s a link to the introduction in Google Books for the interested…). My reading for the rest of the week is going to include Giddens, Giroux, Gramsci, Habermas and Mouffe. And then I think my brain might melt.
That mix certainly should melt your brain!
I’ve just read (bits of) that critical theory book! It’s pretty good, if a bit reductionist. A wee part of my Aber dissertation is on why LIS and critical theory should be linked.
Good luck with your reading
Thanks! I don’t think the book could be anything other than a bit reductionist – and I think the editors point that out at the beginning – but I do think it’s an excellent starting point and I’ve picked out the bits I found most (potentially) applicable to my topic so I can have a much deeper read into them.