SHAPE - Shaping Digital Citizenship is an interdisciplinary research center aiming to promote democracy and citizenship in a world marked by data and algorithms. The objective is to generate knowledge at a high international level and to contribute to public debate, businesses, and civil society.
Digitalization presents both new opportunities and challenges for democracy. On one hand, it creates new communities and opportunities for participation; on the other, it brings new democratic vulnerabilities with emerging forms of exposure, inequality, and polarization.
SHAPE's ambition is to contribute to responsible, democratic digitalization by promoting inclusion, knowledge, dialogue, and welfare in the digital society.
This is achieved through knowledge- and research-based solutions in close cooperation with the surrounding society. This approach grounds the solutions in a debate about who we aspire to be as a society—how we want to work, educate, express, interact, and the solutions and technologies that can support these goals. Thus, it will help to develop the future digital democratic society locally, nationally, and internationally.
The center will create a framework for robust, often interdisciplinary, and socially inclusive research projects that can examine, evaluate, and take a critical and ethical stance on technological developments and the human consequences—both direct and indirect—of increased digitalization, with a special focus on issues related to democratic participation and formation.
The aim is also to develop and test solutions—technologically, organizationally, and culturally—that have the potential to shape the digital society of the future.
SHAPE builds on a long Scandinavian tradition of interdisciplinary and inclusive research in democracy and information technology, which has had a strong presence at Aarhus University since the 1980s. SHAPE thus has a solid foundation for creating new insights, concepts, methods, and forms of collaboration that can help ensure data and algorithms are used to advance democracy and citizenship.