The Autumn School (15–16–17 September 2026) introduces and develops the application of ethnography within cryptography for establishing meaningful security goals and models, which is the methodology at the core of the Social Foundations of Cryptography project.
The Autumn School is intended for both cryptographers and ethnographers who wish to gain insight into each other’s approaches, motivations and challenges, and to explore how these two fields can be meaningfully brought into conversation.
The programme combines lectures, research talks and hands-on group discussions and exercises to enable participants to engage in questions on how to ground cryptographic research in real social practices and how to conduct ethnographic studies that uncover security goals.
We want to stress that the focus of this School is to bring cryptography and ethnography into conversation, and we do not expect any prior knowledge of ‘the other field’.
| Time | Session |
|---|---|
| 09:30-10:00 | Coffee |
| 10:00–11:30 | Introduction to the Social Foundations of Cryptography Project |
| 11:30–13:00 | Lunch |
| 13:00–15:00 | Parallel sessions: - Cryptography for Social Scientists (Lecture) - Ethnography for Computer Scientists (Lecture) |
| 15:00–15:30 | Coffee |
| 15:30–17:00 | Exercises / Discussions |
| Time | Session |
|---|---|
| 09:00-09:30 | Coffee |
| 09:30-10:30 | Wild Interdisciplinarity: Ethnography and Computer Science Meet at the Margins (Murray Goulden) |
| 10:30-11:30 | A cryptographer’s search for meaning (Lenka Mareková) |
| 11:30-13:00 | Lunch |
| 13:00-14:15 | On Seeing and Unseeing – Practice-Oriented Provable Security and the Social Construction of Cryptography (Phillip Rogaway) |
| 14:15-14:45 | Coffee |
| 14:45-17:00 | Exercises / Discussions |
| 19:00 | Dinner |
| Time | Session |
|---|---|
| 09:00-09:30 | Coffee |
| 09:30-10:30 | Cryptographic Evidence in Norwegian Courts (Tjerand Silde) |
| 10:30-11:30 | Information security in small-scale protests – ethnographic fieldwork with Ugandan climate activists (Ntezi Mbabazi) |
| 11:30-13:00 | Lunch |
| 13:00-14:00 | Leakage from Ideal Functionalities and Its Implications for Deployment of PETs (Kenny Paterson) |
| 14:00-15:00 | Information security in Philippine environmental struggles: reflections from ethnographic fieldwork (Mikaela Brough) |
| 15:00-15:30 | Coffee |
| 15:30-17:00 | Exercises / Discussions |
Stewart House
32 Russell Square
London WC1B 5DN
United Kingdom
Registration is now closed.
For questions, please contact: simone.colombo@kcl.ac.uk.