Center For Digital Dignity is a research initiative to dissect the complex relationship between online media cultures and political participation, and advance critical inquiry on the sociocultural and political impacts of online media and artificial intelligence.
Our interventions in digital research have centered upon long-term ethnographic investigations, emphasis on historical awareness, collaborative mixed methods (data science and qualitative research), and multimodal engagements. We host a range of projects, from ethnographic explorations of online cultures in Brazil, Kenya, Germany, India and the UK, to global comparative studies of extreme speech, artificial intelligence, social media, and hate speech moderation.
We emphasize dignity as a core value in online cultures of participation. Building a collaborative network of scholars and activists, we are making a collective effort to foster enabling spaces of political expression and social equity.
Projects
The centre leads a series of research projects on extreme speech, digital politics, social media platforms, Internet and AI policy, and anthropology of artificial intelligence -- funded by the European Research Council, United Nations Peacekeeping, Social Science Research Council, the Henry Luce Foundation and others.
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The core team of researchers at LMU Munich draws strength from prominent academics on the advisory board and collaborators researching new media in South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East alongside North America and Europe. We join the efforts to bring the experiences of new media and AI expansion in the global South and the global North regions for comparative insights and for tracking global convergences.These experiences remind us that new media are not just about fake news or filter bubbles, but a shifting amalgam of contradictory possibilities.
Center for Digital Dignity
At the core of our endeavour is the value of digital dignity — to study and advocate for spaces where political expression and technological development can expand in an enabling culture of interactions for prosocial ideals. Center for Digital Dignity is a global network of scholars, policy experts and civil society groups, bridging academic knowledge with policy and outreach. The center explores social media, AI cultures, and technological mediation, as they shape the structures and imaginaries of political dignity and social equity.
Funding
For Digital Dignity has received funding from the European Research Council (Grant Agreement Number 714285 and 957442), the Henry Luce Foundation, Cambridge-LMU Strategic Partnership, Bavarian Institute for Digital Transformation (BIDT) and Bayerische Forschungsallianz. The projects are hosted at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Munich, in cooperation with the Department of Communication and Media Research at the university, and a network of collaborators.
Image credits: Morcillo Valenciano, J. A., 2011, Flickr. Josep Lluís, 2021, Wikimedia Commons Matrix movie still Adampol, C., 2013, Flickr. Engin_Akyurt, n.d., Pixabay. Clarote & AI4Media / https://betterimagesofai.org / https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Field images by team members