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Cognitive Security

2024-2025

Project Title: Cognitive Security and Insecurity: Interdisciplinary Perspectives

Democratic societies are facing a growing set of cognitive threats. These threats do not target infrastructure alone. They target attention, trust, interpretation, and belief. They move through media systems, platforms, institutions, and everyday social interactions, increasingly shaped by AI.

In the defense context (including Canada and its allies) this problem is increasingly conceptualized as one of "cognitive security". Yet little has been said about what exactly cognitive security might consist of, and considerations which seem self-evident from the security frame reveal complex, contested, and nuanced issues when translated and brought into contact with relevant scholarship. 

This project explores democratic responses to information threats through the concept of cognitive security. Using an interdisciplinary lens, we ask: How do we make sense of this based on our expertise?  What would it look like to frame these challenges under the banner of cognitive security and cognitive resilience, in a way that is both scholarly and publicly meaningful?

Faculty Members: 

  • PI: Jacqueline Burkell, Associate Professor, Faculty of Information & Media Studies 
  • Nandita Biswas Mellamphy, Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, Faculty of Social Sciences 

Postdoctoral Fellows: 

  • Andrew Buzzell, Department of Philosophy, Faculty of Arts & Humanities 

Trainees: 

  • Lucas Pokrywa, PhD Student, Department of Political Science, Faculty of Social Sciences