The Future of Human Rights in a Digitised Age (FRIDA)

With the normalisation of digital technologies in all aspects of the civic space, new vulnerabilities and harms emerge.

Developments in the human rights field, about a right to digital inclusion, fails to capture the situation and vulnerabilities of those who for legitimate reasons cannot participate in the digitised society. So what rights are there for living offline in an online society? Conventional human rights theory is not apt to conceptualise these challenges.

We aim to understand how people in digital exclusion are affected as human rights subjects, and to develop a theory of human rights and the human rights subject that is apt for life in the digitised age.The lived experiences of positions of alterity are in the centre of this project, where ethnography and photo-elicitation are used to develop empirically grounded human rights theory.

Over the course of three years the project will work closely with research participants in the city of Malmö to create research data and develop a philosophical foundation for a rights subject locked into digital exclusion.

We will host international workshops and online seminars for scholarly exchange and offer early career training for students.

An important part of the project is public engagement, with a blog, social media engagement, and an exhibition co-curated with research participants.

Reconceptualising digital exclusion, we provide new knowledge about what it is to be a human rights subject in the digitised society.