The ‘Scaling Trust’ project is a UKRI Future Leaders’ Fellowship examining trust in the cyber security profession. As the initial period of funding comes to an end, CIM academics Matt Spencer and Daniele Pizio have published two policy papers that engage with current challenges in cyber security.

‘Assurance by Principle: Preparing for the next generation of technology assurance’ is a report by Matt Spencer, published through the Research Institute for Sociotechnical Cyber Security (RISCS). It provides a series of recommendations for moving technology assurance policy away from prescriptive standards, and towards the new ‘goal-based’ approach that has become influential in cyber policy.

‘Deperimeterising Zero Trust: Challenging metaphors in information security’ is a policy brief by Matt Spencer and Daniele Pizio, part of the University of Warwick’s Policy Briefing Series. It examines current challenges with the trend towards a ‘Zero Trust’ paradigm for information security, and draws conclusions aimed at industry, government and academia.

In his new book, Dr David Vitale proposes an innovative trust-based framework for judicially enforcing social rights, informed by the trust scholarship from various disciplines and aimed at promoting the trustworthiness of government in delivering social services.

Professor Diarmuid Costello has been awarded a Leverhulme Research Fellowship (2023-4) to work on his next book project, a collection of essays provisionally titled Spurs to Thought: Philosophical Engagements with Contemporary Art.

Professor Costello says: "The goal of this research is two-fold: to demonstrate the remarkable capacity of selected works of contemporary art to function as spurs to philosophical reflection, if approached in the right spirit; and, in so doing, to establish the value of what I call “philosophical criticism” as an alternative to currently dominant methodologies in the philosophy of art, whether analytic or continental. The project brings this method to bear on the kind of contemporary works that often elicit hostility or confusion, so as to make clear the challenge that such works may implicitly pose to our unreflective understanding of normative concepts we make use of every day".

Professor Costello's previous, recently completed monograph, Aesthetics after Modernism will appear in 2024 with Oxford University Press (NYC) in Noël Carroll and Jesse Prinz’s ‘Thinking Art’ series.

"Aesthetics after Modernism argues for the ongoing relevance of aesthetics to appreciating art after modernism. It aims to show that even the hardest of “hard cases” remain amenable to aesthetic analysis on an adequate conception of the latter. The book traces the contrary view of much recent art criticism and theory to Clement Greenberg’s success in recruiting Kant’s aesthetics to underwrite a formalist conception of aesthetic value. This has led later theorists to miss the resources in the third Critique for understanding our cognitive relation to the kinds of art in which they are interested. It is widely assumed that Kant’s aesthetics cannot speak to the semantic dimension of art; I provide an interpretation of Kant’s theory of art, taking Conceptual Art as my test case, that suggests otherwise. If it can be shown that Kant’s aesthetics can accommodate the appreciation of art with no sensible features, then it should in principle be able to accommodate any kind of art".