The Centre for Digital Citizenship investigates the social and political consequences of current developments in digital media technologies – smartphones, social media, algorithms, data, and beyond – and asks how these technologies shape individuals, citizens, collectives, and publics. While digital technologies offer progress in terms of political mobilization and public conversation, they also hold the potential to enhance old inequalities and divides, countering trust in society. The Centre for Digital Citizenship seeks interdisciplinary explanations to these complex digital developments and their societal effects.
The Centre conducts research on pressing societal challenges, focusing on the implications from the development, deployment, and diffusion of digital media technologies in all walks of public life, from governmental and private organizations, to the everyday lived realities of citizens.
As societies increasingly turn to data streams to model and understand human behaviour, automated and algorithmic decision-making processes gain increasing power to influence public policy and corporate strategy. Such processes raise pressing questions around issues of equality and ethics, demanding critical research into the politics of algorithms and their orientation in the public interest.
Networks and social media have the capacity to bring diverse and distant individuals together for productive ends, but also afford those with harmful motives the ability to associate with relative anonymity. These outcomes of everyday media use require greater understanding how the affordances and infrastructures of platforms facilitate the formation of new publics and politics, including how individuals anticipate and respond to these developments.
The digitalization and datafication of human behaviour and communication results in massive amounts of data in institutions and organizations, be they large tech companies, governmental bodies, or private companies. This aggregation and accumulation of personal and collective data relates to pressing question around privacy, GDPR regulations, surveillance and ownership, demanding enhanced governance to ensure standards, avoid malfeasance, and manage innovation.
Transformations in mediated communication intensify and polarize issues of public concern, leading to a situation where even the most well-documented truths can be denounced as ‘fake’ while blatantly false statements seem to thrive. These new ideological battlegrounds and online shouting matches engender crises of trust in the platforms that mediate public opinion formation and those we encounter on them, ultimately leading to legitimacy crises in traditional democratic institutions.
Professor Sine Nørholm Just, RUC, will be head of a new research project that will enlighten us on how we as a society and people can live with artificial intelligence and algorithms in a good way.
The recently established Centre for Digital Citizenship at Roskilde University will investigate how digital technologies are transforming public engagement.
The Centre for Digital Citizenship was recently profiled in one of Denmark’s leading academic trade publications, Forskerforum, for its contemporary, interdisciplinary approach to humanities research.
Email: digitalcitizenship@ruc.dk
Chris Peters, Professor, cpeters@ruc.dk
Sine Nørholm Just, Professor, sinenjust@ruc.dk
See the members of the Centre for Digital Citizenship at the Roskilde University Research Portal
The Centre has been founded by researchers at the Department of Communication & Arts but is open to everyone. If you would like to know more about the Centre and/or join, you are most welcome to get in touch at digitalcitizenship@ruc.dk or to e-mail the co-directors.
The following projects are currently affiliated with the Centre:
Algorithms, Data & Democracy
Sine Nørholm Just – Villum and Velux Foundation
Alternative Media and Ideological Counterpublics
Eva Mayerhöffer – Carlsberg Foundation
AlterUse – Digital Alternative News Use in Denmark
Eva Mayerhöffer, Steering Committee - Independent Research Fund Denmark (Inge Lehmann), 2023 . DKK 2,879,859
Beyond the Here and Now of News
Chris Peters & Kim Schrøder – Independent Research Fund Denmark
DATAPUBLICS
Jannie Møller Hartley – Velux Foundation
DIS-TRUST – Digital Society and Trust
Esther Oluffa Pedersen, Steering Committee - Velux Foundation, 2023. DKK 5,697,697
#echopol – Modelling Polarization Dynamics on Danish Social Media
Eva Mayerhöffer, Steering Committee - Independent Research Fund Denmark (Research Project I), 2023. DKK 2,879,556
Feminist Activism in Transition
Lene Bull Christiansen – Independent Research Fund Denmark
Scandinavian Border Crossings
Rikke Andreassen – Forte
The Future of Cultural Policy
Anja Mølle Lindelof - Independent Research Fund Denmark (Network grant), 2023. DKK 718,479
Learn more about the projects at the Roskilde University Research Portal
We seek interdisciplinary explanations to complex digital developments and their societal effects.
The research centre is based at Department of Communication and Arts
Related research units: Audiences & Mediated Life research group // Media and Culture research group // Organizing Communication and Digitization research group
PhD Programme: Doctoral School of Communication and Arts
Relevent Degree programmes: Journalistik (DK) // Communication Studies // International Bachelor in Humanities
Find additional information about the Centre for Digital Citizenship:
Chris Peters
Professor
Phone: +45 4674 2238
cpeters@ruc.dk
Sine Nørholm Just
Professor
Phone: +45 4674 3363
sinenjust@ruc.dk
