My privacy

The Introduction shows that privacy can be conceptualised in terms of seclusion and solitude, anonymity and confidentiality, intimacy and domesticity, so that it is unnecessary to agree on a definition of privacy in order to analyse it philosophically. It shows that democratic theory and practice provide a set of working assumptions about what is valuable and right, equal and unequal, free and unfree which enable us to distinguish privacy from other values, and to resolve those disagreements about its nature and value which are, in fact, resolvable by some combination of theory and practice.

Language and Thought. New Delhi: Northern Book Centre, 2012

Edited by J.C. Basak and K. Joardar

In this editorial essay for a special issue of The Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry, we introduce the issue’s seven articles, and share some speculations about the nature of the secret in its relation to poetry.

Platform, 2013

In his 1958 poem "Dedication to my Wife" TS Eliot proclaims "these are private words addressed to you in public". Simultaneously written for his wife, Valerie Fletcher, and to the implied you of a discourse network Eliot"s poem helps to illustrate the narrative voices and silences that are constitutive of an intimate public sphere. This paper situates reciprocity as a condition of possibility for public privacy. It shows how reciprocity is enabled by systems of code operating through material and symbolic registers.

Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry, 2018

A special issue of The Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry on the theme of secrecy, co-edited with Ed Luker. Jo Walton and Ed Luker, Poetry and Secrecy David Grundy, Poetry and Secrecy in Luke Roberts’ To My Contemporaries Dorothy Butchard, Secrecy, Surveillance and Poetic “Data Bodies” Jordan Kay Savage, ‘I Don’t Talk to the Police Except Never’: Anna Mendelssohn, Tom Raworth, and Anti-Confessional Life Writing Nisha Ramayya, Secreting Blackness in the Poetry of D.S. Marriott Luke Roberts, Grave Police Music: On Bill Griffiths Vicky Sparrow, ‘[A] poet must know more than | a surface suggests’: Reading and Secrecy in the Poetry of Anna Mendelssohn Tom Betteridge, Peter Manson’s Language Surfaces David Spittle, Conference report: Secret Poetry: Fifth Northumbria Poetry Symposium, 2016

Studia Caroliensia, 2015

The rhetoric of the cold war idealized the home as the sacred precinct of individual privacy, yet the intrusions into citizens’ private lives increased in frequency and severity in the 1950s. Confessional poetry was high culture’s ambivalent response to this phenomenon: while confessional poets resented the infringement of personal space, they also revealed private family matters. As a woman, Plath experienced the patriarchal nature of privacy: it was the man’s private life that enjoyed protection from scrutiny, while the woman’s position as an autonomous individual remained precarious. Thus, by exposing the private tensions in her marriage, Plath was voicing concerns about the validity of the doctrine that the home is the right place for women to locate their autonomy. This paper offers close readings of Sylvia Plath’s late poems that show an acute sensitivity to violations of privacy and venture to redress the injuries of female dignity, reclaiming personhood through the imaginative realm of transgressive poetry.

1971

This report presents and evaluates a simple thesis: that privacy, a manifestation of human territoriality, is a fundamental bio-social need. Aggression can serve to insure privacy. Privacy, then, allows one the freedom to explore the environment. It permits intimacy with others, and it fosters access to one's own inner feelings and experiences, a precondition for creativity. Essentially, privacy, territoriality, crowding, aggression, intimacy and creativity are seen as biological predispositions whose manifestations are greatly modified by social circumstances. The remarks presented here consider definitions, examples and functions of these several terms and concepts, and attempt to relate these concepts, sociologically, to the self, to others, and to one's

2017

European Data Protection Law Review, 2018