The Digital Society Research Theme Team
Several members of the digital society research theme were returned to the University of Salford’s Unit of assessment 34: Communication, Cultural and Media Studies, Library and Information Management submission as part of the UK Research Excellent Framework exercise in 2021. This submission climbed the rankings to sit within the top third of institutions in the UK. Notably 77.1% of the outputs we submitted and 100% of our research impact was ranked as Internationally Excellent or World Leading1.
We are a multidisciplinary team of 25 academics and postgraduate researchers who examine the diverse experiences we have in our lives due to our intensities of engagement, or not, with the digital. We are comprised of people from Counselling and Psychotherapy, Criminology, Information Management, Internet Studies, Media and Cultural Studies, Nursing, Psychology, Sociology, Social Policy and Social Work.
A key consideration for us is the need explore and challenge the ways in which equality and diversity, and their intersections, can have differential positive and negative effects on our experiences of digital life, and thus, often today, life in general. While this agenda speaks to traditional notions of equality, diversity and inclusion in the UK, we think about this in other ways tool, for example in terms of:
- social class;
- levels of literacy;
- where English is not a first language;
- living situation;
- location of residence;
- non-normative lifestyle preferences.
We study the relationship between digitisation and:
- areas of personal life: from childhood, families and health, to identities, relationships and sexuality;
- areas of public life: from communities, leisure activities and consumption, to citizenship, work, and political activism;
- the changing the nature of academic research, where we develop, deploy and critique digital methods, engage with considerations of the ethics of big data, and critical data studies more generally.