Elena Pavan

INVESTIGATING EVOLVING DISCOURSES ON HUMAN RIGHTS IN THE DIGITAL AGE Emerging Norms and Policy Challenges

This article investigates how human rights in the digital age can be considered as an overall frame accommodating fundamental rights and freedoms that relate to communication processes, and related challenges, in societies worldwide. The article brings together different disciplinary backgrounds (communication studies, linguistics and sociology of networks) and complementary empirical analyses of the content, structure and relevance of evolving discourses concerning human rights in the digital age. In doing so, the article defines and adopts a constructivist and communicative approach to the study of world politics, and details its relevance in order to assess the evolution of normative standards concerning communication as a human right in the transnational context.

#TakeBackTheTech and #WhatAreYouDoingAboutVAW. Reclaiming ICTs and Soliciting Stakeholders' Responsibility to End Violence Against Women

Twitter in order to both gather information and to reach younger audiences (Billings 2014; Pedersen 2014). As the examples above illustrate, the #HERESPROOF hashtag reached some media gatekeepers, though we believe that this interaction ought to be much more ubiquitous to move the conversation forward. In order for the #HERESPROOF project to be successful, and for women’s sports coverage to change, it is essential that sports journalists—and ultimately decision makers— recognize audiences of women’s sports. Social media spaces where advocates (and fans) of women’s sports express interest provide a fruitful site of analysis for feminist media scholars in the quest to disrupt assumptions around gender and sport.

International Norms and Socio-technical Systems: Connecting Institutional and Technological Infrastructures in Governance Processes

This paper looks at the challenges posed by ICT critical infrastructures in their interaction with governance processes. The authors argue that, in order to develop better understanding of how (global) governing arrangements are made in a highly mediatised environment, adequate frameworks should be elaborated to study the interrelation between institutional and technological infrastructures. In this context, institutions are conceived as collections of norms - including a mix of rules and practices - while technological infrastructures are seen as instruments that transform governance processes, also enabling different actors’ participation. Adopting a constructivist approach, combined with a focus on governance networks, the authors introduce a multi-dimensional analytical framework to investigate governance processes where institutions and technologies converge to create socio-technical systems.

Making Computer and Normative Codes Converge: A Sociotechnical Approach to Smart Cities

In this paper, we propose that a smart approach to city development must seek a continuous and recursive interplay between two levels of codes. On the one hand, computer codes, which rule the development and the functioning of the ubiquitous ICTs infrastructure. On the other hand, normative codes, which govern the practices through which social actors perceive ICTs and decide to exploit them in order to improve their lives. We thus take an exploratory standpoint and investigate to what extent key players in the EU smart cities policy domain are framed according to such a sociotechnical perspective. To this purpose, we first map an online issue network on the topic of smart cities in Europe and then explore the frames that circulate within its core. Our results suggest that, although smart cities are framed sociotechnically, EU key players tend to better converge around technological aspects rather than social ones.

Designing anticipatory policies through the use of ICTs

ABSTRACT This paper seeks to achieve a better understanding of how and under what conditions current digital communication technologies can become an asset to the design of effective policies. In order to do so, we bridge two strands of reflection that have hitherto developed quite independently – i.e. policy design studies and researches on the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) to reform the public sector. We start from the assumption that different governmental political and technical capacities shape different spaces for action and thus different types of policy design in which policy-makers can involve citizens via ICTs in three modes: co-design; design fine-tuning; crowdsourced policy design. According to this framework, we analyse three different ‘revelatory case studies’ in which ICTs have been employed by governments while designing policies: Iceland’s recent experiment to redraft collectively its constitution; La Buona Scuola, the latest Italian public education law; and the Finnish Avoin Misteriö, a platform for crowdsourced legislation. By exploring the different modes in which ICTs have been integrated in the formulation of these three policies, we show that it is possible to disentangle different and more or less effective ways of exploiting ICTs’ networking and communicative potential for designing successful public policies.