King's College London

This pilot project has aimed to examine young people’s experiences of London as a digital city, in relation to:

• Digital /smart communications infrastructures, which may manage access to, and circulation of, data about the city, its diverse communities, and socioeconomic challenges.
• Place-based and digital cultures, which may enable (or hinder) opportunities for coming together, learning and socializing with each other in physical and virtual spheres.
• Place-making expressions and experiences of sociality for opening up roots to belonging

Between March and June 2023 the team held a number of participatory mapping and discussion events to:

• Gain an understanding of the ways in which students’ experiences of global cities such as London is filtered through digital & mobility apps, social media and/or localised communications infrastructures
• Scale up participatory agency in students’ experiences and development of critical and resilient digital literacies surrounding digital cities and datafication.
• To develop research- informed ‘collaborative’ pedagogies.
• Develop further learning resources, based on informed-collaborative pedagogies for DDH’s modules in digital culture and media.

As part of the project, the team designed and produced the Outsmarted toolkit was funded by the Digital Futures Institute. The toolkit builds upon participatory, capacity building methodologies devised by numerous projects including the Media, Community and the Creative Citizen project and the UnBias AI project with further adaptions based on input of faculty and students from the Department of Digital Humanities at King's.