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.