During the last decades, social movement scholars have become fascinated by the connections between digital technologies and activism. From listservs, websites, and email communication during the global justice movements in the late 1990s, to the extensive use of social media by pro-democracy movements (Della Porta, 2015; Flesher Fominaya, 2017) including the Arab Spring, the 15-M (Spain), the Umbrella (Hong Kong) and Sunflower (Taiwan) movements, among many others.

Although they come from different political and geographical contexts, all these examples illustrate how technologies have become embedded in social movements, posing ethical, methodological, and theoretical challenges. Digital technologies, for example, not only facilitate collective action, but also weave social movements' meanings (Toret, 2013). In addition to transmitting or amplifying collective identity, social media can also shape the political identity of movements (Milan, 2015). Among the recent challenges faced by digital activists are incorporating algorithms into their repertoire (Treré, 2019; Treré & Bonini, 2022), dealing with misinformation and hate speech (Siapera, 2022; Siapera & Viejo-Otero, 2021), and relating it to radical politics seeking social change (Fenton, 2016). All these factors present huge challenges for studying digital activism. What theoretical approaches can we use? What methods do we follow? What are the ethical issues involved? The upcoming activity will address these questions.

On this basis, the project organized a two-day seminar on studying digital activism at Aarhus University, with a special focus on algorithms and contentious data in social movements in May 2023. The aim was to provide a useful toolkit for researchers when facing the challenges of studying digital technologies and social movements, and to strengthen ties and build research networks with leading international scholars.