Call for papers: The craft of interdisciplinary research and methods in public interest cybersecurity, privacy, and digital rights governance

Special Issue of Internet Policy Review

assignment_returned Abstract submission deadline: November 8, 2024
assignment_returned Full paper submission deadline: March 7, 2025

As datafication, surveillance, and artificial intelligence increasingly pervade everyday life—impacting work, health, and human rights—questions of cybersecurity, digital privacy, and data justice have become central to governance and regulatory challenges. Recognizing the complex interplay between technology, law, and societal impacts, scholars and practitioners from diverse disciplines, including social sciences, law, computer science, and engineering, are engaging in interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary, and transdisciplinary research. These collaborative efforts aim not only to deepen our understanding of complex digital harms but also to inform targeted legal reform, regulatory policies, and design interventions that avoid exacerbating existing inequalities (Harkin and Merkel, 2023).

Recent years have seen a flourishing of research combining computer science (such as computer security and Human-Computer Interaction / HCI methods) with social science and legal studies. This research explores topics like censorship and network measurements (Ververis et al., 2023), information controls (Ruan et al., 2021), commercial spyware (Marczak et al., 2024), gender and technology-facilitated violence (Molnar and Harkin, 2019; Parsons et al. 2019), privacy in mobile apps (Siapka and Biasin, 2021), and a vast range of algorithmic accountability projects (Raghavan et al., 2020; themarkup.org). Many of these studies have introduced much-needed transparency into technological ecosystems to clarify the practical (in)adequacy of legal frameworks such as GDPR (Guamán et al., 2021) and the EU AI Act (Kelly et al., 2024) or have directly informed design-related or other policy reforms to address socio-technical inequities (Costanza-Chock et al., 2022). 

However, while interdisciplinary research in public interest cybersecurity, privacy, and digital rights governance continues to advance, two critical gaps remain. First, as noted by DeNardis and colleagues (2020), there is a relative lack of reflexive analysis on interdisciplinary work in the field of internet governance as an object of research in its own right. Most studies tend to focus on research findings without explicitly examining the methodologies and collaborative dynamics that bring this work into being. This special issue aims to address this by fostering a platform for contributors to reflect on and analyze the craft and conduct of interdisciplinary research that combines technical sciences, social sciences, and law. It will share insights into methodological innovations, successes, and the practical challenges of working in cross-disciplinary research teams. Second, there is limited detailed examination of how interdisciplinary research into public interest cybersecurity, privacy, and digital rights governance—which is central to creating an evidence base for meaningful policy development—can be effectively leveraged with intersectoral partnerships involving civil society, journalists, and policymakers. While these partnerships are essential for advancing social and political impact, there are often diverging incentives, interests, and practical constraints that shape the success of these partnerships. By inviting contributions from academics and practitioners that explore these practical elements, this special issue seeks to provide critical insights and strategies for building and leveraging intersectoral partnerships to enhance digital policy reforms.

Scope of the special issue

Social science researchers—spanning sociology, political science, communication, and media studies—contribute refined understandings of the social impacts of technology, though they may lack design or ‘code-level’ awareness. Law scholars focus on doctrinal methods geared towards the application of specific provisions to emerging technologies, yet they may not fully grasp technical realities and social harms. Computer science and engineering disciplines possess a deep understanding of the technological environment but often adhere to engineering problem-solving rationalities that can overlook broader social implications and regulatory contexts. Each of these fields, on its own, can lead to contrasting outcomes (see Deibert, 2020), but when integrated, they offer a powerful opportunity to leverage disciplinary strengths into robust analyses of the socio-technical harms and regulation of digital technologies. Science and technology studies (STS) epistemology has gained widespread appeal for its ability to account for complex socio-technical dynamics in digital practices (Musiani, 2016), yet explicit reflections about the practical undertakings of conducting STS-oriented cross-disciplinary research—including those that combine technical, social, and legal methods—are often less addressed as a discrete object of analysis.

This special issue aims to foster a rich dialogue among researchers, practitioners, policymakers, and civil society organizations, providing a platform for reflecting on the unique challenges and successes encountered in interdisciplinary and intersectoral work on public interest cybersecurity, privacy, and digital rights. Beyond the scholarly research process itself, advancing the social and political impact of interdisciplinary scholarly research involves navigating partnerships with civil society, industry, journalists, and policymakers. This is a distinct field of practice, characterized by different incentives, interests, constraints, and practicalities that mediate the prospective impact of evidence-based digital policy reforms. Intersectoral partnership building, while necessary for advancing meaningful impact, can also raise novel challenges that must be navigated. 

By focusing on the craft of collaboration across diverse fields—including political science, sociology, communication, media studies, computer science, systems design engineering, and law—and often involving engagement with government, civil society, and the media, this special issue will highlight innovative research designs, collaborative methodologies, data integration efforts, and advocacy strategies. It will provide critical insights into the obstacles faced and strategies employed by interdisciplinary teams working on public interest issues in these domains. We invite submissions from a broad range of contributors, including academics, practitioners such as lawyers and policymakers, and members from civil society and advocacy organizations. Our goal is to gather contributions that advance public interest technology governance research beyond merely presenting research findings, to reflexively examine the craft and conduct of interdisciplinary and intersectoral research itself. This focus recognizes the fundamental importance of interdisciplinary work for advancing transparency, accountability, and digital rights governance, including the development of shared knowledge that can lead to targeted and effective regulation.

Focus of the papers

We welcome submissions that explore, but are not limited to, the following topics:

  • Case-studies in interdisciplinary teamwork: successes, challenges, and lesson drawing

  • Developing shared language and vocabularies across disciplines and/or sectors

  • Integrating theories, concepts, and methods across social, legal, and technical disciplines 

  • Digital methods and interdisciplinary research design 

  • Challenges of data integration in multi-disciplinary research 

  • Evaluating the prospects and limits for critiques of power in interdisciplinary teams 

  • Interdisciplinary research and the future of ‘regulation by design’

  • Legal dilemmas and ethical considerations in interdisciplinary research 

  • Building durable partnerships for public interest research 

  • Translating interdisciplinary insights into policy impact

  • Collaboration with investigative journalists

  • Social and cultural dimensions in diverse research teams  

  • Teaching and graduate supervision across disciplines 

  • Publication strategies across disciplines and sectors

 

Special issue editors

 

Important dates 

  • 750-1000 word abstracts should be emailed to adam.molnar@uwaterloo.ca (please put “IPR Interdisciplinary Special Issue” in the subject line) by 8 November 2024.

  • Decisions will be communicated to the authors by 29 November 2024.

  • Full papers of the selected abstracts should be submitted by 7 March 2025.

  • The deadline for submitting the revised paper for peer-review to the journal is 18 July 2025.

  • The planned publication date of this special issue is Q3 2025.

 

References

Costanza-Chock, S., Raji, I. D., & Buolamwini, J. (2022). Who Audits the Auditors? Recommendations from a field scan of the algorithmic auditing ecosystem. In Proceedings of the 2022 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (pp. 1571-1583).

Deibert, R. J. (2020). The Biases of Information Security Research. Researching Internet Governance, in Researching internet governance: Methods, frameworks, futures (eds De Nardis, L., Cogburn, D.L, Levinson, N.S., and Musiani, F.) pp. 231-252.

DeNardis, L., Cogburn, D., Levinson, N. S., & Musiani, F. (Eds.). (2020). Researching internet governance: Methods, frameworks, futures. MIT Press.

Guamán, D.S, Del Alamo, J.M., and Caiza, J.C. (2021). “GDPR Compliance Assessment for Cross-Border Personal Data Transfers in Android Apps,” in IEEE Access, vol. 9, pp. 15961-15982. 

Harkin, D., & Merkel, R. (2023). Technology-Based Responses to Technology-Facilitated Domestic and Family Violence: An Overview of the Limits and Possibilities of Tech-Based “Solutions”. Violence Against Women, 29(3-4), 648-670.

Kelly, J., Zafar, S. A., Heidemann, L., Zacchi, J., Espinoza, D., & Mata, N. (2024). Navigating the EU AI Act: A methodological approach to compliance for safety-critical products. arXiv preprint arXiv:2403.16808.

Marczak, B., Scott-Railton, J., Abdul Razzak, B., & Deibert, R. (2023). Triple Threat: NSO Group’s Pegasus Spyware Returns in 2022 with a Trio of iOS 15 and iOS 16 Zero-Click Exploit Chains.

Molnar, A., & Harkin, D. (2019). The consumer spyware industry: An Australian-based analysis of the threats of consumer spyware. Report prepared for Australian Communications Consumer Action Network (ACCAN). 

Musiani, F. (2020). Science and technology studies approaches to internet governance: Controversies and infrastructures as internet politics, in Researching internet governance: Methods, frameworks, futures (eds De Nardis, L., Cogburn, D.L, Levinson, N.S., and Musiani, F.) pp. 85-104.  

Parsons, C., Molnar, A., Dalek, J., Knockel, J., Kenyon, M., Haselton, B., & Deibert, R. (2019). The predator in your pocket: A multidisciplinary assessment of the stalkerware application industry.

Raghavan, M., Barocas, S., Kleinberg, J., & Levy, K. (2020, January). Mitigating bias in algorithmic hiring: Evaluating claims and practices. In Proceedings of the 2020 conference on fairness, accountability, and transparency (pp. 469-481).

Ruan, L., Knockel, J., & Crete-Nishihata, M. (2021). Information control by public punishment: The logic of signalling repression in China. China Information, 35(2), 133-157.

Siapka, A., & Biasin, E. (2021). Bleeding data: the case of fertility and menstruation tracking apps. Internet Policy Review, 10(4), 1-34.

The Markup. (n.d.). https://themarkup.org

Ververis, V., Lasota, L., Ermakova, T., & Fabian, B. (2024). Website blocking in the European Union: Network interference from the perspective of Open Internet. Policy & Internet, 16(1), 121-148.