Focusing on political participation, digital activism and participatory governance, DATACTIVE explores the future of democracy as it evolves under the pressures and uncertainties of datafication and massive data collection. It goes beyond the state of the art in at least four ways:
1. By analyzing people's understanding of and engagement with datafication and technological innovation, including Artificial Intelligence, as well as the epistemological and ontological consequences of datafication on the organization of social life, DATACTIVE contributes to critically assess the risks and promises of datafication and technological innovation for contemporary societies, and liberal democracies in particular. It provides unique empirical material and ultimately contributes to theory development.
2. By addressing an underexplored but rapidly growing field of human activity at the crossroads of the social, the informational and the technological, DATACTIVE sets the basis for the understanding of the future of civic engagement and political participation as technology, data, and AI progressively move to the core of citizen participation.
3. By integrating adjacent disciplines in the social sciences and the humanities that seldom interact (e.g. sociology of social movements with science and technology studies), DATACTIVE magnifies their ability to understand the interplay between society, information, technology and power.
4. By developing dedicated data collection and analysis tools and sharing the resulting open-source software with the broader research and activist communities, it adds to methodological innovation in big-data analytics.
In addition, DATACTIVE has wider societal implications:
1. It contributes to the self-reflexivity of activists and civil society organizations engaged in data activism by involving them in the research cycle, by sharing data, and by providing open-source software that they can use to better understand their own activities and the society where they intervene.
2. Turning research data into points of intervention, DATACTIVE actively contributes to shape the public debate on digital rights and risks, by sharing research findings with the general public and delivering talks for a popular audience, interacting with the media, and collaborating with civil society groups on the ground.With the Big Data from. the South Initiative, DATACTIVE expands its geographical scope to specifically focus on disempowered groups in the South(s).
3. By explicitly bringing the team and the research in dialogue with society at large and governance institutions, and by practicing "engaged research" (an approach to social inquiry that, without departing from evidence-based social science research, aims at making a difference for disempowered communities beyond academia), DATACTIVE contributes to rethink the role of research and research institutions in society.
4. By implementing horizontal, participatory and collaborative working dynamics in its day-to-day activities and in its interaction with both academia and the research subjects, DATACTIVE contributes to transform the hierarchical dynamics of contemporary academia, engaging in a prefigurative exercise that reforms research institutions "by doing".
