Missions

Digital technologies - like climate change - are rapidly transforming our societies. They are also the source of rigorous debate: seen either as a source of great promise in terms of democratic participation, collective organization and knowledge production, or as the source of future catastrophes, from the collapse of democracies and rampant disinformation to the replacement of humans by machine. These visions share a common thread: the belief that the social sphere is entirely conditioned by its technical environment. The humanities and social sciences have a responsibility in these debates to defend a more nuanced perspective that contextualizes these technologies within a broader social, political and cultural space. 

The main mission of the Open Institute is to re-examine the digital world from a social sciences perspective. It draws on historical, economic, legal, sociological and political analyses to understand and explain the transformations brought about by digital innovations, and to examine how technologies themselves adapt to societal changes. 

The Open Institute defends an alternative vision of digital technologies and their societal impact, reflecting a French and European approach driven by democratic values. It intends to develop a constructive discourse on digital technologies and services, which is both critical of and open to the opportunities offered by digital tools. In order to complete this mission, the Open Institute will not only draw on the humanities and social sciences, but also build strong collaborations with other scientific disciplines (including via the TIERED project partners) to investigate technologies and the knowledge that underpins them, with the help of those who produce data and design algorithms.

Building on its 15 years of experience in examining these challenges, Sciences Po, with the creation of the Open Institute for Digital Transformations, will offer research and academic opportunities combining an understanding of technical tools and their impact. In so doing, the university is establishing itself as a unique and influential player in the French, European and global technological landscape.

MISSIONS

The Institute, created as a part of TIERED, a transformative organizational project, supports Sciences Po’s actions on digital transformations. It has the following objectives:

• Promote Sciences Po's unique position at the intersection of research, education, and impact by giving visibility and coherence to existing initiatives and programs in France and internationally.
• Reinforce research on and with digital technologies to make Sciences Po a research university of reference in the humanities and social sciences on the challenges of digital transformations for our democracies.
• Strengthen the educational offer to provide all students, across all programmes and throughout the continuum of studies, with training on digital challenges and practical skills. 
• Accelerate our interdisciplinary collaborations with scientific disciplines beyond the social sciences and humanities, with regards to our teaching, research, and interaction with society.
• Contribute to a new policy of disseminating and promoting knowledge through open science, engagement in public debate and finding new pathways to involve the public in our research.

THEMES

Five priority themes will guide our interdisciplinary work with partners over the next three years:

• Digital inequalities: Far from the objective neutrality they promise, AI algorithms and prediction tools pose serious problems of equity in many fields of application (from health to education, public administration, etc.). The feeling that these algorithms are “black boxes” is reinforced by the opacity surrounding their methods. This theme looks at how we can understand, evaluate, and combat these inequalities.
• Politicization of science: Scientific expertise, and scientific institutions more broadly, are increasingly contested and enmeshed in social and political issues. The aim of this theme is to understand the new interactions being established between science and society in a wide range of fields (including oceans, health, etc.).
• Digital participation: This theme focuses on describing new forms of political participation, whether they result from deliberative mechanisms directly mediated by technology, or emerge from forms of mobilization and spontaneous public expression online. It follows the transformation of political life in a context of growing mistrust in representative democracy. It also seeks to understand how opinions and new political forms are structured in transnational digital spaces, and the impact of disinformation and polarization on the legitimacy of elections.
• Digital traces for the social sciences: Social data are no longer reduced to statistics produced by state agencies. In the digital age, social data is everywhere which raises not only theoretical questions of social science, but also legal questions concerning access to such data. In addition, AI offers new perspectives for adding value to classic social science data, such as qualitative interview databases.
• Culture as Data: This theme examines how to compose (including the technical and legal issues) and exploit cultural databases (books, films, digital videos, music, diplomatic cables, museum collections, press archives, etc.) to retrace the history of social representations and power relations over time.