A presentation by Prof. Gillian Bolsover and Dr. Jamie Ranger (Hasso Plattner Institute). This event is a part of the Digital Governance Research Colloquium hosted by the Centre for Digital Governance.
Digital citizenship, understood as “the norms of appropriate, responsible behaviour regarding technology use” (Ribble et al, 2011) is becoming ever more important as we navigate the challenges and opportunities of the digital age. Recent definitions have endeavoured to broaden its account to include “the ability to participate in society online with a critical and civic-oriented approach” (Choi, 2016). However, many discussions focus too much on teaching technical skills and practical strategies, without substantial critical engagement with how political theory conceives of citizenship. Furthermore, traditional conceptions of citizenship often revolve around individual rights and responsibilities within a single country, ignoring the global and interconnected nature of the internet.
This paper argues for a rethinking of digital citizenship that is informed by theoretical debates on cosmopolitanism. This perspective sees digital citizenship as a set of responsibilities and obligations we have to other internet users around the world - and while cosmopolitanism has been criticised for its implicit elitism and impracticality, we suggest that it can nonetheless support a politicised perspective on digital citizenship at the intersection of two literatures that rarely overlap. We aim to develop a theoretically informed normative framework for a transnational pedagogical approach that supports fair and inclusive digital literacies, while decoupling these literacies from any particular state-citizen relationship.
Prof. Dr. Gillian Bolsover completed their PhD at the University of Oxford’s Oxford Internet Institute, studying how the commercialisation of online spaces impacts political speech in democratic and authoritarian systems. As postdoctoral researcher in the Computational Propaganda Project, they co-authored pioneering research on bots, misinformation and hyper-partisan content in the 2016 US election. Their work on computational propaganda in China contributed to a study that won the Vaclav Havel Democracy Award.
In 2018, they became a Lecturer in Politics and Media at the University of Leeds, using computational social science to analyse topics such as the US COVID crisis, Black Lives Matter, the 2019 Indian general election, and Chinese environmental discourse. Since 2023 they have been working at the University of Potsdam, funded by a €2.2 million GIZ grant. They have advised governments, NATO, the EU and Facebook, and their research was cited in the US Senate Intelligence Committee's report on Russian interference.
Dr. Jamie Ranger is a postdoctoral researcher trained in both the Anglo-American analytic and European continental traditions of philosophy and the history of political thought. He is passionate about bringing political and philosophical ideas and approaches to bear on developments in technology and digital communication. A fun fact about him is that he is a Londoner in Berlin.
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