Hello!

I'm Nick, another postgrad here in the CAPPE ANU/CSU realm. ANU = Australian National university, CSU = Charles Sturt University, but we generally all hang out on the ANU campus.

My area of study lies in censorship, freedom of the scientist, and regulation of sensitive research, among (many) other things. So I'll probably be posting a lot about conspiracies, repressive governments, and WMDs. Oh, and occasionally ranting about stupid people trying to suppress science (Intelligent Design community, I'm looking at you).

Today, just to give you a taste, I've been working on completing my first chapter of my thesis, in which I hope to develop a series of moral arguments that nuance between acceptable and unacceptable methods and motivations for restriction of information. Which for today has meant pouring over commentaries (not archival materials, thankfully) on Elizabethan and Jacobean England. Why? Because due to an unsettling lack of coherence about perceptions of censorship, I've decided to do a historical analysis of the phenomena in an attempt to understand it better. Following a cursory reading of the literature, I started to write, and then realised how little I knew about censorship. It's been a long couple of months...