This was not my intended thesis…. Dr Pip Thornton
When I started out on the first cohort of CDT students in 2013, my proposed thesis was about military geographies. Influenced both by my time as a police officer in London, and by a brief but unsettling deployment to Iraq as a reservist soldier in 2003, I wanted to research how the military is represented in different physical, cultural and online spaces - specifically when away from the actual field of battle. Framing this proposal as a security issue was not difficult, especially as all things ‘cyberwar’ were particularly hot that year. It was my first-year summer project that changed all that. I’d been at a briefing at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) on the national and military security risk posed by the friends and family of service personnel posting compromising information on social media. Which was fine, except the phrase that kept being used was not ‘friends and family’, but ‘wives and girlfriends’, which not only erroneously gendered the problem, but also add...