About

How can we help governments and institutions to make sense of novel data resources?

How can open societies benefit from digital developments? How can digital societies be shaped around public and democratic values? These are some of the most urgent questions of our time. The Shaping Digital Societies (SDS) community, building on six years of experience as the Governing the Digital Society (GDS) focus area, brings together expertise from media and culture studies, psychology, law, economics, governance, philosophy, and computer science. Researchers, active in all these different fields, explore how digital societies are imagined, created, governed, and transformed. This community, with an interdisciplinary approach, will foster dialogue on how to build transparent, accountable, and inclusive digital institutions that sustain openness and trust in the digital era.

Central to SDS is the interdisciplinary study of how digital societies are imagined, created, governed, and transformed. This overarching theme is articulated through three interconnected and mutually reinforcing subthemes. Many of the most pressing societal challenges, such as AI, digital infrastructures, sovereignty, digital autonomy, literacy, and democracy, require approaches that simultaneously engage questions of governing, educating, and creating digital societies.

Interdisciplinary collaboration

Utrecht University employs a number of researchers in various departments who are working on the issue of governing digital societies. We encourage interdisciplinary research groups and projects combining perspectives from humanities, social sciences, and information and computer sciences. We welcome theoretical, normative, empirical and practical-applied angles as well as research contributing to governance design; we closely collaborate with societal and industrial partners to engage in governmental practices. We also actively stimulate cross-overs with other focus-areas at UU (e.g. Applied Data Science and Human-centered AI).

External partners

We are closely allied with the Utrecht Data School (UDS) and Utrechtse Datawerkplaats as our core team members overlap. Through these three initiatives we combine research, teaching and projects. We engage with external partners, such as municipalities, media organisations and governmental institutions. Partners who are interested in collaboration, please contact one of the staff members.

Special Interest Groups

In January 2020, we started developing special interest groups (SIGs) who actively collaborate in research, developing course material, co-creation with external partners and outreach. Please look at our Special Interest Groups.