Digital Inequalities Symposium for Early-Career Researchers

The CRIS aims to strengthen its expertise on the topic of digital inequalities. We invite early career researchers (PhD students and Post-docs from a variety of disciplines, e.g. sociology, economics, psychology, political science, computer and computational science, anthropology, demography and related fields) working with a variety of theoretical perspectives and research methods to submit their papers and participate to the symposium. The event will take place on Thursday 19 December at Sciences Po, in partnership with the Open Institute for Digital Transformations (part of TIERED). This symposium provides a platform to present groundbreaking research, engage in discussions, and collaborate with other researchers.

The rapid proliferation of digital technologies - from computers, the internet and portable devices to social media, streaming devices and virtual reality, along with artificial intelligence (AI), automation, and algorithms - has transformed modern societies.

Social inequalities both shape and are shaped by these digital tools, raising questions about the persistence, reproduction, and exacerbation of social inequalities. At the same time, an explosion of digital data and methods of analysis, from digital ethnographies to computational methods have broadened our understanding of how society operates in the digital era.

Several lines of inequality research are key factors in the relationship between digital technologies and society:

1. Digital inequalities around access is the most long-standing research on tech disparities. While scholars have largely moved on from classic “digital divide” research, much is still to be known about changes over time and place, especially with variation in constantly changing devices and connections. Equally important is understanding the persistence of digital content production and whose voices we are streaming and scrolling – and whose we are not. This research stream considers, for instance, inequalities based on country, social class, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, race, and migration background.
2. More research is needed on information inequalities in the use of digital technologies, whether with social connections or news and media resources. More research is needed on the skills and the capacity to evaluate disinformation and AI-generated content. With costs and complexity of digital platforms exploding at the same rate as new apps, who is left out of the savvy and autonomous use of these tools is important to study.
3. Algorithmic bias and discrimination research has been growing: how do these inequality mechanisms operate globally and intersectionally? What are other forms of automated inequalities that are understudied?
4. How do digital technologies affect people’s life chances, for instance, with respect to education and labor market outcomes, earnings, or capacity for civic engagement and voting? To what extent, if at all, do social groups enjoy different returns to the use these tools?
5. How do humans and machines co-evolve within different social environments and technical ecosystems? How do different algorithmic recommendation systems and AI-driven assistants shape concentration, polarization, inequality, and radicalization?
6. How can the spread of AI and computational methods support researchers in revealing, understanding, and measuring phenomena traditionally analyzed in social science? How can qualitative and mixed-methods interact with digital methods?
7. Big Tech companies are vertically integrated in society and are a growing source of political and economic power. How is this creating inequalities globally, locally, and in the tech job market itself?
8. Policy implications: is access to & use of technology more or less unequal than access to and use of traditional media such as broadcast media, newspapers and magazines, telephones? Access to and use of DT is highly unequal, but does their spread represent a net increase or decrease in equality? How might regulatory policies affect digital inequalities?

Join us in this endeavor to bridge the knowledge gap and foster outstanding social science research on inequality and the digital transformation! We look forward to your contributions and insights before the deadline: 15 November 2024.

Please download here the proposal and the submission guidelines (pdf, 148 ko). For any queries, contact allison.rovny@sciencespo.fr.