Theorizing relational privacy: embodied perspectives to support ethical professional pedagogies

This chapter outlines the critical processes of theorizing which draws upon normative and critical perspectives to resituate the question of privacy and ethics as a relational concern. These normative questions are framed in the context of professional education for analysts making complex decisions about private and sensitive information. An examination of the phenomenon of privacy as it is experienced from the first person perspective necessitates a degree of normative modelling which was initially inspired by empirical work in behavioural economics, but which has since departed from that paradigm. The interpretive framework adopted draws upon the phenomenological work of Jean-Luc Marion to identify two distinct approaches to the valuation of private information. These distinct approaches to the meaning and value of privacy point to a disjunction between the ways digital systems and human beings process and value information. The implications of this approach for interpretive research and pedagogy in the age of massive open data repositories (‘Big Data’) are also considered