Digital Social Sciences

The Digital Social Sciences theme explores how digital technologies are (re)shaping society, culture, politics, and everyday life. From algorithmic governance and platform economies to online activism and digital identities, this theme invites doctoral researchers to critically engage with the socio-technical forces driving contemporary change. It offers a dynamic space to interrogate the digital not just as a tool, or as a ‘method’, but as a subject of inquiry that demands new theoretical frameworks, ethical considerations, and methodological approaches.  Such work is inherently interdisciplinary, bringing together interests from a diverse set of social sciences and beyond.  

Digital technologies are increasingly embedded in the social, cultural, and political fabric of contemporary life, and are deeply entangled with social practices, values, and power relations. From this perspective, researchers in the Digital Social Sciences theme are developing critical and reflexive inquiries into the assumptions underlying design, the consequences of digital implementation, and the lived experiences of users. It is through this lens that social science can interrogate digital infrastructures as sites of governance, resistance, and transformation. This theme, therefore, invites doctoral researchers to examine the design, governance, and lived experience of digital infrastructures, asking not only what technologies do, but whose interests they serve and what futures they enable or constrain across a range of fields and disciplines.  

This theme is vital to the future of social sciences research, offering insights into urgent global challenges such as misinformation, surveillance, inequity, changing human-computer relationships, and educational futures. We invite applications that confront these challenges through theoretically informed, methodologically innovative, and socially engaged research that transcends traditional disciplinary boundaries. By examining the digital as an evolving site of power, practice, and possibility, doctoral researchers will contribute to understanding and reshaping the socio-technical conditions of contemporary life. 

Digital Social Sciences

SENSS researchers engaged in this theme include:

SENSS universities engaged in this Theme:

Contents

  • Machine learning, and methodological approaches

  • Archival and computer-assisted qualitative methods

  • Digital governance

  • E-governance

  • Topics on social networks

  • Dating apps

  • Substantive challenges of digitalisation of society

  • Social engagement with digital technology and services

  • Research into digital markets and industries

SDGs

  • GOAL 4: Quality Education

  • GOAL 9: Industry, Innovation, and Infrastructure

ESRC Priorities

  • Putting data analysis at the heart of decision-making

  • The economy

  • Politics and governance

Examples of successful projects in this theme:

  • Project title: AI Advice in Financial Decision-Making: Which Factors Drive the Seeking and Integration of AI Advice?

    University: City St George's, University of London

    Primary supervisor: Dan Mercea (dan.mercea.1@city.ac.uk)

    Secondary supervisor: Andreas Kappes (andreas.kappes@city.ac.uk)

  • Project title: The influence of video technologies on conflict faced by amateur football referees and the co-design of a conflict management intervention

    University: University of East Anglia

    Primary supervisor: Laura Biggart (L.Biggart@uea.ac.uk)

    Secondary supervisor: Simon Hammond (S.Hammond@uea.ac.uk)

  • Project title: Improving flood risk communication to promote informed decision making by at-risk communities in the context of climate change

    University: University of East Anglia

    Primary supervisor: Jordan Harold (Jordan.Harold@uea.ac.uk)

    Secondary supervisor: Kenny Coventry and Irene Lorenzoni (I.Lorenzoni@uea.ac.uk)

  • Project title: An exploration of the disconnects between relationships and sex education policy and young people's experiences of post-digital relationships and sex education in England

    University: University of East Anglia

    Primary supervisor: Harry Dyer (Harry.T.Dyer@uea.ac.uk)

    Secondary supervisor: Esther Priyadharshini (e.priya@uea.ac.uk)

  • Project title: Developing an Auditory-Spatial Working memory task with visually impaired, blind and sighted children to investigate neural and behavioural developmental trajectories of  auditory attentional control functions

    University: University of Lincoln

    Primary supervisor: Timothy Hodgson (tlhodgson@lincoln.ac.uk)

    Secondary supervisor: Julia Foecker (J.Foecker@lincoln.ac.uk)

  • Project title: Autistic Social Space: A spatial digital ethnography of an online community of autistic women

    University: Goldsmiths University of London

    Primary supervisor: Nirmal Puwar (n.puwar@gold.ac.uk)

    Secondary supervisor: Kathryn Higgins (K.Higgins@gold.ac.uk)

  • Project title: Extractive Infrastructures: Unearthing the Spatial Politics, Assetization and Digital Colonialism of UK Data Centres 

    University: Goldsmiths University of London

    Primary supervisor: Scott Wark (s.wark@gold.ac.uk)

    Secondary supervisor: Nathaniel Tkacz (n.tkacz@gold.ac.uk)

  • Project title: Toxic Queer Masculinities - Tools for navigating AI-integrated subjectivity

    University: Goldsmiths University of London

    Primary supervisor: Emily Rosamond (Emily.Rosamond@gold.ac.uk)

    Secondary supervisor: Scott Wark (S.Wark@gold.ac.uk)

  • Project title: Power Asymmetries of Digital Labour and Humanitarianism: Artificial Intelligence, Refugee Data Workers, and Colonial Dependencies in Lebanon 

    University: Goldsmiths University of London

    Primary supervisor: Mirca Madianou (m.madianou@gold.ac.uk)

    Secondary supervisor: Jason Vincent A. Cabañes (j.cabanes@gold.ac.uk)