Contemporary issues in digital politics
Etablissement : ESPOL European School of Political and Social Sciences
Langue : Anglais
Formation(s) dans laquelle/lesquelles le cours apparait :
Période : S4
The course is at Master 2 level (advanced seminar / capstone) and assumes that students already have a good command of the concepts and tools covered in the program’s modules (digital democracy and governance, digital political communication, digital law and society, EU digital policies, digital sociology, security/risk, and quantitative and qualitative research methods). Students must be able to read academic texts in English and feel comfortable with group work and seminar-based discussion.
- Connect theories of digital democracy, communication, sociology, security, and law to current controversies in digital politics.
- Analyze how platforms, recommender systems, and AI shape political visibility, participation, and decision-making.
- Assess disinformation, polarization, and digital mobilization as structural features of contemporary public life.
- Compare democratic and authoritarian models of digital governance, including EU, U.S., and non-Western approaches to platform and AI regulation.
Design and defend a case dossier that links a concrete empirical case in digital politics to the course’s theoretical frameworks and, more broadly, to the DPG curriculum, while offering a critical reflection on any use of GenAI tools.
- Digital public arenas, the hybrid media system, “platform society”
- Algorithms, recommender systems, algorithmic institutions
- Information disorder (mis/disinformation), computational propaganda, circulation dynamics
- Affective publics and polarization
- Digital activism, social movements, repression (climate focus during ESPOL Green Week)
- AI- and data-driven surveillance, infrastructures, inequalities (predictive policing, biometrics, welfare scoring, borders, smart cities)
- Platform and AI regulation (DSA/DMA, GDPR, AI Act),
- Digital sovereignty, Big Tech & IR
- Synthesis and “case clinics”
