Forskningscenter Centre for Digital Citizenship

Research Themes

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.

Algorithmic Societies & Justice

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.

Mediated Publics & Engagement

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.

Organizational Data & Governance

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.

(Dis)information & Trust

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.