Humboldt Research Fellowship for 2023-2025
I have been awarded a Humboldt Research Fellowship for Experienced Researchers at the IZEW of the University of Tubingen for the years 2023-2025.
Abstract of the project
In the past few decades, citizen participation in fields as diverse as politics, economics, arts, and media has drastically increased on a global scale. Digital technologies have boosted this trend by offering new possibilities for expression. In this spirit of “ubiquitous participation”, the cultural sector as well has been confronted with the phenomenon of rapid transformation based on participant involvement. One of the main effects has been the explosion of digital participatory platforms for culture, i.e. digital environments that allow contributors, also called amateurs, to express themselves by posting or commenting on content about their cultural objects. This phenomenon has taken two different directions: amateur platforms and institutional platforms. Research tends to describe these two scenarios as opposing phenomena. Our research aims to go beyond this opposition and to propose a new approach to study digital participatory platforms for culture based on the idea of cross-media. We argue that digital participatory platforms for culture should not be interpreted in a Manichaean way by opposing the “bad” commercial platforms to the “good” institutional platforms. We aim at exploring the cross-media issues that these platforms generate and the ambiguities of their functioning. By focusing on the dynamics of design and use and by exploring the underlying interactions between human and non-human actors, we will study the motivations of users and the status of produced knowledge. In particular, the Humboldt Research Fellowship at the IZEW of the University of Tübingen would allow us focusing on the ethical questions that underline the success of these platforms. The project will be organized around three actions: ethics of digital participatory platforms; ethics of methods for studying digital participatory platforms; and ethics through participation.