Based on their interests and focus, students select courses in areas Observe, Analyse & Apply and of Make & Intervene, to which the course in Emancipatory Digital Transformation belongs.
This course critically explores digital transformation from a social-ecological and emancipatory perspective, engaging students with the ethical, socioeconomic, political, and ecological implications of digital technologies. The course challenges dominant techno-fixing narratives and instead centers digital justice, commons, sustainability, and care.
Students will explore how digital infrastructures, platforms, and products shape societal structures, and reinforce or resist systems of power and exclusion. The course offers both critical reflection and hands-on experimentation, encouraging students to envision and prototype digital tools, services, or interventions that challenge dominant digital paradigms and propose emancipatory alternatives fostering social-ecological transformations.
The course will touch upon a wide spectrum of concepts and issues, such as: concentration of power, surveillance and social control, social Media (Misinformation, Propaganda, Potentials, Alternatives), AI (types, biases, impact, labour, democratic control, potentials, alternatives), environmental and social impact of digital technologies, Critical Computing, SHCI (Sustainable HCI), Digital sovereignty and Data justice, Digital Commons, Free and Open-Source Software, Platform Cooperativism, Civic and Social Infrastructures, Collective empowerment, civic society and social movements.