The keynote of this year's Summer School of the was given by IGSD Director of Digital theme lead Prof Dorothea Kleine.
The Summer School, hosted at University of Sheffield, brings together over 30 PhD students from a wide variety of countries and disciplines. Prof Kleine's Lecture was titled: Building better digital futures: sustainability, equity, and co-design justice.
In the keynote, Prof Kleine introduced her work operationalising the capabilities approach as a normative framework to judge the degree to which a specific digital innovation is liberating or disempowering.
Drawing on recent work, the talk highlighted the entanglement of capabilities expansion with climate justice and environmental limits. Drawing on her recent co-authored book, , she presented key principles for a fairer and more sustainable digital future.
To illustrate the challenge of concrete co-design of digital innovation along the lines of these principles, Prof Kleine discussed recent work with marginalised groups as co-designers in South Africa, carried out in collaboration with South African colleagues.