Oppression vs. liberation through digitisation

Data collection has unwittingly become a currency by which citizens are able to access communication, information, and security services. When we speak of datafication, we refer to the routine way in which social behaviour is quantified in order to be collated and analysed, a practice that is becoming increasingly characteristic of contemporary social life (Dencik et al, 2018). The ecosystem of connective media demonstrates an underlying trust that citizens have placed in both public institutions and private companies (van Dijk, 2014). Digitisation has fundamentally changed the way in which citizens can negotiate social, political and economic spheres and if we are to investigate the meaning of active citizenship, it must be done with an active awareness of the prevalence of routine data gathering (Hintz et al, 2019). The copious ways in which personal data are collected and stored have been largely protected from ethical scrutiny as they have been conceptualised as being symptomatic of the way in which society is increasingly organised around technology (Couldry and Yu, 2018). This panel brings together scholars from a range of institutions and disciplinary backgrounds to examine the multiple ways in which datafication and oppression can overlap, also highlighting the liberating effects that technology can have under oppressive