To celebrate the ten year anniversary of DIGSUM, the research centre will throughout the year host monthly seminars featuring leading researchers, emerging scholars, and invited speakers working at the intersection of digital technology and society.

DIGSUM’s research group in Digital Sociology has recently appointed Marina Shturmina as a new PhD student.

DIGSUM researcher Moa Eriksson Krutrök recently participated in an expert workshop organized by the European Centre for Algorithmic Transparency (ECAT) at the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre in Sevilla.

Earlier this autumn, DIGSUM held its yearly symposium. This year’s theme was Digital Darkside: Crime and Control in Online Spaces.

DIGSUM director Simon Lindgren will speak this week at the regional digitalisation conference Mötesplats Digitala Västerbotten where he will discuss why organisations and communities need to build a more critical dialogue around digitalisation and AI.

On the 3rd of December the EC2U Think Tank will take place at Umeå University bringing together academia, citizens, Umeå Kommun, Folkuniversitetet Umeå, and other key actors in discussions about Equitable and Universal Access to Education.

We are looking for a new PhD student to join our research group in Digital Sociology. The project focuses on how digital technologies – especially social media and artificial intelligence – affect the conditions for political communication, mobilisation and power in today's society.

The DIGSUM Centre for Digital Social Research at Umeå University, in collaboration with the Swedish Research Council (VR), invites everyone interested to a 2-day symposium on 18-19 September 2025 to explore how crime and control are reshaped in a digital society.

DIGSUM postdoc Xénia Farkas and co-editor, Franziska Marquart invite scholars from the fields of media, communication, political science, and related disciplines to submit extended abstracts for a special issue exploring the evolving landscape of visual political communication.

DIGSUM at Umeå University has been awarded SEK 30.3 million from the Wallenberg Foundation’s WASP-HS programme for a major new research cluster titled AI, Power and Politics.

On Friday April 11, 10:00 to 12:00 and 13:00 to 15:00, DIGSUM hosts a workshop on webscraping and text visualisation. It will be held by our invited guests Dalia Ortiz Pablo and Maria Skeppstedt, Research Engineers at the Centre for Digital Humanities and Social Sciences at Uppsala University.

On the 4th of April, TAIGA invites you to a talk on “Empowering Learning with AI by Navigating Challenges and Opportunities” held by Thomas Mejtoft, the Department of Applied Physics and Electronics, Umeå University. The talk is a part of TAIGA’s seminar series #frAIday on different perspectives on AI.

DIGSUM team members Henrik Sigurdh, Felicia Lundstedt, and Simon Lindgren participated in the WASP-HS Winter Conference 2025, held from February 5th to 7th at Stockholm University.

On the 25th of February, DIGSUM researcher Samuel Merrill will participate in a roundtable panel discussing the question “Is AI the future of collective memory?”. The roundtable discussion is hosted by the Digital Memory Studies Association (dMSA) and is dedicated to a special issue of Memory Studies Review.

On the 28th of February, TAIGA, DIGSUM, and the Department of Sociology at Umeå University invite you to a talk on “Stochastic Remembering and Distributed Mnemonic Agency” held by DIGSUM researcher Samuel Merrill together with Rik Smit and Thomas Smits.

DIGSUM, at the Department of Sociology, welcomes Lina Eklund who will give a seminar entitled Post-critique in practice: using interactive fiction to explore the future of human-AI relations. Lina will speak about speculative design as post-critique to explore alternative human-AI futures.

DIGSUM is happy to present a new issue of The Journal of Digital Social Research, our open access journal. This special issue, with guest editors Fenwick McKelvey, Jonathan Roberge, Joanna Redden and Luke Stark, focus on “(Un)Stable Diffusions: The Publics, Publicities, and Publicizations of Generative AI”.

Simon Lindgren and Anne Kaun have recently published an article that introduces “programmable politics” as a new concept and perspective for understanding the complex relationship between technology, society, and politics in the 21st century.

On the 28th of January, Humlab invites you to a seminar where Frans Mäyrä, Tampere University, will talk about “The Future of Game Culture in Society”.

Here is some recommended (Swedish) listening in relation to Simon Lindgren’s book on Critical Theory of AI.