The Body in Youth’s Digital Citizenship: Investigating Justifications of Algorithmic Governance
The Body in Youth’s Digital Citizenship: Investigating Justifications of Algorithmic Governance
Name of applicant
Liv Nøhr
Title
PhD student
Institution
École des hautes études en sciences sociales, and University of Helsinki
Amount
DKK 2,673,302
Year
2026
Type of grant
Internationalisation Fellowships
What?
Algorithms obfuscate automated decisions. Digital literacy is thus both a matter of reading the digital systems around us and connecting this knowledge to lived experiences. I investigate adolescents’ digital literacy by studying their doubts when pictures of their bodies are governed by algorithms to explore how skills and experiences guide what questions adolescents’ as of the governance tools.
Why?
Algorithms make untransparent decisions on human bodies on everything from social media to health care. The lack of transparency fosters a democratic problem, which politically is addressed by educating for digital literacy, primarily through digital skills. The focus on skills is critiqued for ignoring cultural dimensions of algorithms, but it is unclear how lived experiences can be integrated.
How?
The empirical materials will consist of qualitative data generated from adolescents’ tinkering with an algorithm. It is based on Danish, Finnish and French students to explore different approaches to digital literacy and different cultural conventions of governance of digital spaces. This will allow me to outline dimensions of digital literacy connected to both skills and lived experiences.