Maud van Roessel | Digital inequality and social inclusion of disadvantaged communities in the Netherlands

Maud van Roessel | Digital inequality and social inclusion of disadvantaged communities in the Netherlands | Tilburg University, Department of Communication and Cognition | Daily supervisor/project lead: dr. William Marler, Promotor: prof. dr. Marjolijn Antheunis, Co-supervisors: dr. Nadine Bol, dr. Sara Pabian | 01 December 2024 – 01 December 2028 

Similar to other societal inequalities, digital inequality may drive wedges in the ways society coheres, through shaping the inclusion and opportunities experienced differently across groups. Therefore, this PhD project seeks to explore the complexities of “socio-digital inequalities”– referring to the interconnectedness between digital and broader societal inequalities – by bringing together academic and experiential knowledge on technologies and media, socio-digital inequality, intersectionality, and social (co-)inclusion (Helsper, 2022, p. 4).

Accounting for wider power structures and the affordances of technologies, I ask how people with marginalized identities experience socio-digital inequality and social (co-)inclusion; not by focusing on a so-called “damage-centered framework” that revolves around people’s ‘pain’ but rather by accounting for the complexities and multiplicity of people’s identities and lives (Tuck, 2009, p. 413). I do so by exploring for instance how people ‘refuse’ to adhere to the unjust structures inherent to many digital technologies while also utilizing their possibilities (Gangadharan, 2021; Hoffmann, 2021).

Embracing De La Bellacasa's (2012) argument for a “thinking with care” that allows space for different kinds of knowledge to accumulate into a ‘thicker’ knowledge, my objective is not to uncover what people are ‘lacking’ but rather to learn from their experiential knowledge through participatory (action) research (p. 199; Cornish et al., 2023; Tuck, 2009). Such thick knowledge – within which there is not one knowledge that is valued over another – accounts for the kinds of complexities that can allow us to grasp the ramifications of the ever-evolving socio-digital inequality (De La Bellacasa, 2012; Imran, 2023).