Brittany Halley is a Ph.D. candidate in Writing, Rhetoric and Literacy. She studies how humans navigate risk and uncertainty in surveillance-security contexts, focusing on the material-discursive conditions around emerging technologies, especially those that maintain and resist systems of power. Her current research projects explore how border surveillance technologies use hostile and deliberately-opaque algorithms to constitute (non)belonging, how everyday experts disseminate anti- and counter-surveillance literacies, and how for-profit entities use risk framing to normalize interpersonal rhetorics of fear and violence.

She encourages anyone interested in collaborating to reach out.

Selected Publications

• Halley, B., & Velasquez, E. (2026). Lessons in Security Logics from Cold-War Guatemala. Journal of Technical Writing and Communication, 56(1), 93-108. doi.org/10.1177/00472816251384909.