DCitizens Summer School Attendees 2024
DCitizens is returning with a five-day training event in Lisbon, Portugal, that will explore the strategies and techniques to engage and work with communities to co-create, deploy, and evaluate civic technologies that seek to empower citizens in service provision and civic participation. This event will include a one-day Doctoral Consortium (14th July 2025) and a four-day Summer School (15th-18th July 2025).
Summer School 15th-18th July 2025:
Through a series of seminars, workshops and hands-on activities, you will have the opportunity to go engage with real-world challenges and collaborate with members of local communities, which aim to provide you with some of the skills to work with communities and organisations to explore and realise Civic Technologies values.
The Summer School has been designed for students studying, working on research, or interested in Human-Computer Interaction and Community Informatics; and will take place on 15th-18th July 2025 at the University of Lisbon (Lisbon).
Register your attendance for the Summer School by 14th June 2025:
Themes for 2025:
Exploring the Relationships between Design, Technology, and Social Justice
Students will have the opportunity to critically investigate the complex relationships between technology design, social justice, equity, and power. Within HCI, research has investigated the ways in which technologies can propagate injustices and inequities in areas where “oppression, such as racism, sexism, ableism, ageism, classism, and so on, impact people’s experiences with technology, information and design” (Dombrowski, 2017). In response to this, Digital Civics and HCI researchers have been striving to work with citizens to design and use technologies that challenge power asymmetries and injustices (Chordia et al., 2024).
It is within this intersection that you will engage in interactive sessions and activities, where you will explore and apply methods for identifying and addressing bias, inequities and power-asymmetries (e.g. Value-Sensitive Design, Data Feminism), engage with participatory approaches to foster inclusion (e.g. Participatory Design, Design Justice, Autonomous Design), and grapple with the ethical responsibilities inherent in shaping more just technological futures.
The Next Generation of Civic Technologies
Increasingly we have witnessed a turn towards the digitalisation of the civic sphere with for example, initiatives such as the European Commission’s Digital Decade policy program motivating the digitalisation of public services. In parallel, we have witnessed citizens and grass-root communities, civic and activist groups turn to technology as a means of bottom-up civic engagement (McCord & Becker, 2023) where technologies are being integrated into their everyday processes (Johnson & Vlachokyriakos, 2024; Palacin et al., 2024), advocacy work (Asad & Le Dantec, 2017), political deliberation (Mahoney et al., 2016) and activism (Wong et al., 2024).
Students will have the opportunity to explore and look beyond current tools, actively envisioning the future of civic technologies in an increasingly politically unstable world. Participants will investigate emerging innovations and technologies as opportunities for enhancing the digitalised civic sphere and experiment with novel design approaches that will shape civic technologies and their configuration within our societies. In addition, students can develop socio-technical concepts of the future aimed at enhancing democracy, civic engagement, community action, and public services in ways that are ethical, inclusive, and genuinely empowering.
Summer School Agenda 2025
Time (GMT+1) | 09h30 | 10h00 | 11h00 | 11h30 | 12h30 | 14h00 | 15h30 | 16h00 |
Monday | Doctoral Consortium – Participants Only (All Day) | Individual Presentations | Coffee Break | Individual Presentations | Lunch | Peer Learning | Coffee Break | Career Discussions |
Tuesday | Registration | Welcome & Introduction to Community Projects | Coffee Break | Discussion: Get to Know the Partners | Lunch | Group Session: Matt Baillie Smith Mapping the Project Space | Coffee Break | Hands-on: KaraokAI Singing Presentation |
Wednesday | Seminar: Anna R L Carter Exploring The Next Generation of Civic Technologies | Coffee Break | Hands-on: Pam Briggs Mapping the Technology Ecosystem | Lunch | Seminar: Clara Crivellaro Exploring The Relationship between Design, Technology, and Social Justice | Coffee Break | Workshop: Anna R L Carter Exploring The Next Generation of Civic Technologies | |
Thursday | Group Work: Investigative Work | Coffee Break | Workshop: Ana Henriques How to Create Zines for Collaborative Project Understanding | Lunch | Group Work: Ana Henriques Creating Zines | Coffee Break | Discussion: Group to Group Critical Friends | |
Friday | Group Work: Final Zine Changes | Coffee Break | Discussion: Small Group Discussions with Partners and Zines | Lunch | Wrap-Up: Reflections on the Week | Coffee Break | Social Time |
Register your attendance for the Summer School by 14th June 2025:
Organisers
Anna Carter is a Research Fellow at Northumbria University she has extensive experience in designing technologies for local council regeneration programs, her work focuses on creating accessible digital experiences in a variety of contexts using human-centred methods and participatory design. She works on building Digital Civics research capacities of early career researchers as part of the EU funded DCitizens Programme and on digital civics, outdoor spaces and sense of place as part of the EPSRC funded Centre for Digital Citizens.
William Imoukhuede is a Research Fellow at Northumbria University. He is currently working on a RAI UK skills project about generating resources for Young Refugees and Asylum Seekers (YRAS) on misinformation, disinformation, and AI literacy. He is interested in the ways emerging technologies affect communities and can be utilised as tools for social change. He will be starting his PhD with the CCAI-CDT at Northumbria in September focusing on Decolonising AI Design.
Kyle Montague is an Associate Professor at Northumbria University and leads the NorSC Research Group. His research spans a breadth of topics and domains with the unifying vision – to address critical social problems and challenges by designing and configuring digital technologies that empower individuals and marginalised communities. More specifically, his work seeks to democratise access to the tools and processes by which we provision technologies and services that shape society.
Ana Cristina Pires is a Research Fellow at ITI-LARSyS and Co-PI of the “Interaction and Perception” research line at the Center for Fundamental Research in Psychology from the Universidad de La República (Uruguay). Much of her work is dedicated to developing inclusive educational technology to facilitate the acquisition of core cognitive skills, such as executive functions, mathematics, and computational thinking, in children with mixed visual abilities.
Hugo Nicolau is an Associate Professor in the University of Lisbon and researcher at the Interactive Technologies Institute / LARSyS. His research interests include HCI and Accessibility, focusing on the design, build, and study of computing technologies that enable positive social change. His work cuts across multiple technologies from mobile and IoT to social robots and artificial intelligence. His research methods extend mostly from the discipline of HCI and are informed by perspectives in Design Justice, Psychology, Sociology, and Disability Studies. Hugo is broadly interested in research that tackles ambitious interdisciplinary problems in areas such as education, health, and social inclusion.
Patricia (she/her) is an HCI researcher who aims to leverage technology in ways that are innovative, inclusive, and impactful. She holds a Bachelor’s and Master’s Degree in Computer Science and Engineering from Instituto Superior Técnico, University of Lisbon. She is currently a PhD student at ITI/LARSyS (Inclusive Computing Lab) and INESC-ID (GAIPS) under the supervision of Hugo Nicolau (ITI/LARSyS), Rui Prada (INESC-ID), and Anna Carter (Northumbria University).In her current research, Patricia focuses on Neurodiversity, Public Spaces and HCI. In collaboration with fellow accessibility researchers, she remains dedicated to creating technologies that cater to the needs of minority groups and is committed to advancing knowledge in this field.
Reem Talhouk is an Assistant Professor in the School of Design and Centre for International Development at Northumbria University. She is also the co-lead of the Design Feminisms Research Group that aims to explore the plurality of feminist research and design. Her research has explored ways through which participatory design and its outputs may generate decolonial counter-narratives within the humanitarian and global development technological space. She has led research, workshops and SIGs focused on Technology, Design and Migration.
Tetyana Vlasova is a project manager for DCitizens project. Her areas of interest are International Education, International Projects Activity, and the Bologna Process. She is an experienced project manager and having managed 12 Tempus/Erasmus funded by EU, 6 British Council projects, 1 academic project funded by the Office for Students, 1 educational project funded by the Department for Education, 2 HORIZON programme projects . She is currently employed at the University of Northumbria in Newcastle and managing HORIZON 2023 project (DCitizens) and coordinating activity of CCAI CDT project funded by UKRI.
Pam Briggs work addresses issues of identity, trust and security in digital interaction and I’m particularly interested in exploring the experiences of those in more marginalised communities. I’m the Northumbria lead for the Centre for Digital Citizens, plus I’m a member of Northumbria’s Academic Centre for Excellence in Cybersecurity (ACE).
Shaun Lawson is a Professor of Social Computing and Head of the Department of Computer & Information Sciences at Northumbria University. His research lies at the boundaries between computing, design and the social sciences, and explores the use and significance of social media, and other collaborative and participatory digital services, in people’s lives. This includes a focus on the design, implementation and evaluation of new social platforms, applications and services as well as analysis of text, speech and image data. He was appointed the UK’s first Professor in Social Computing in 2011. He has conducted applied and cross-disciplinary work in areas including mental health and wellbeing, politics, activism, animal behaviour and sustainability.
Tiago Guerreiro is a Professor of Computer Science at Faculdade de Ciências da Universidade de Lisboa and a researcher at LASIGE. His research is focused on improving accessibility and health, by working closely with the communities he works with, co-designing solutions, developing and assessing their impact in the wild, in carefully-designed deployments. In these areas, he published 75+ peer-reviewed papers. He received awards for 10+ papers, including at ASSETS, CHI, SOUPS and MHCI, the flagship venues for Accessible Computing, HCI, Usable Privacy and Mobile HCI, and an ACM Best of Computing award in 2016. He is Editor-in-Chief for ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing and was ASSETS 2020 General chair. He was an invited expert supporting the European Commission in implementing the Web Accessibility Directive. He currently advises 6 PhD and 8 MSc students and mentors 2 PostDocs. He is a founder and current president of his institution Ethics Review Board, the coordinator of LASIGE’s research line on Accessibility and Aging, and member of the coordination board of the Data Science Master at FCUL. He leads the Tech&People Lab.
Invited Speakers
Ana Henriques is currently a PhD student at the Interactive Technologies Institute/LARSyS, at the University of Lisbon, advised by Hugo Nicolau and Angelika Strohmayer. Ana has focused their research on the intersections of ethics, feminist HCI and community-based work while exploring what community-led ethics could look like as a process of feminist ethical frameworking for community-based projects. She is also a member of the SIGCHI Equity Committee.
Clara Crivellaro is a Reader in Digital social justice at the School of Computing’s Open Lab, with expertise in Human-Computer Interaction, Digital Civics, Human-Centred Design, Participatory Design, and co-creation. Her research explores how the careful design of new and emergent technologies and socio-technical processes can help support democratic practices and advance equity and social justice in digital societies. She is also interested in the design of novel tools and processes to support Responsible Research and Innovation in Computing and civic-driven research commissioning processes.
Matt is a Professor of Global Development and Dean of Research Culture at Northumbria University. His research interests focus on the relationships between civil society, citizenship and development in the global South, with a particular focus on volunteering in humanitarian and development settings, and on young people as development actors. He is Principal Investigator of Refugee Youth Volunteering Uganda (www.ryvu.org), an ESRC/GCRF funded project exploring volunteering by young displaced people in Uganda and its impacts on their skills and employability and experiences of inequality. He is also PI of a BA/GCRF project exploring youth agency for Sustainable Development in Palestine, and a Co-Investigator and Work Package Lead for UKRI/GCRF Living Deltas (www.livingdeltas.org), an interdisciplinary research hub working to support more sustainable futures for deltas in South and South East Asia. Matt is also Research Director of the Swedish Red Cross Led Volunteers in Conflicts and Emergencies Initiative (www.rcrcvice.org), a research, innovation and learning project to support the safer and more effective engagement of volunteers in crises.
- Lynn Dombrowski. 2017. Socially just design and engendering social change. Interactions 24, 4 (June 2017), 63–65. https://doi.org/10.1145/3085560
- Ishita Chordia, Leya Breanna Baltaxe-Admony, Ashley Boone, Alyssa Sheehan, Lynn Dombrowski, Christopher A Le Dantec, Kathryn E. Ringland, and Angela D. R. Smith. 2024. Social Justice in HCI: A Systematic Literature Review. In Proceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’24). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 512, 1–33. https://doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3642704
- Curtis W. McCord and Christoph Becker. 2023. Beyond Transactional Democracy: A Study of Civic Tech in Canada. Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. 7, CSCW1, Article 29 (April 2023), 37 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3579462
- Ian G. Johnson and Vasilis Vlachokyriakos. 2024. Socio-digital Rural Resilience: An Exploration of Information Infrastructures Within and Across Rural Villages During Covid-19. Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. 8, CSCW1, Article 123 (April 2024), 30 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3637400
- Victoria Palacin, Samantha McDonald, Pablo Aragón, and Matti Nelimarkka. 2024. Configurations of Digital Participatory Budgeting. ACM Trans. Comput.-Hum. Interact. 31, 2, Article 28 (April 2024), 28 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3635144
- Mariam Asad and Christopher A. Le Dantec. 2017. Tap the “Make This Public” Button: A Design-Based Inquiry into Issue Advocacy and Digital Civics. In Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’17). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 6304–6316. https://doi.org/10.1145/3025453.3026034
- Jamie Mahoney, Tom Feltwell, Obinna Ajuruchi, and Shaun Lawson. 2016. Constructing the Visual Online Political Self: An Analysis of Instagram Use by the Scottish Electorate. In Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’16). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 3339–3351. https://doi.org/10.1145/2858036.2858160
- Priscilla N. Y. Wong, Aneesha Singh, and Duncan P. Brumby. 2024. I Just Don’t Quite Fit In: How People of Colour Participate in Online and Offline Climate Activism. Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. 8, CSCW1, Article 70 (April 2024), 35 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3637347