Join us on December 3 at noon ET for a talk by DCI Associate Fellow Dr. Victoria Palacin!
Free online event, please register here for link.
Victoria Palacin (@vpalacin) is a researcher and technologist specialized in digital participation for sustainable development. Her current research focuses on understanding the unconscious ideologies that guide the design of digital democracy tools. She advances this work as a postdoctoral researcher at the Helsinki social computing group at the University of Helsinki and as a DCI associate fellow at the University of Toronto. In recent years she has been an affiliate researcher at the UN Digital Government Division and at the MIT Center for Civic Media. Victoria received her doctorate with distinction from LUT University in Finland during 2020 for her work examining the way people participate in digital citizen science.
Victoria Palacin was the DCI fellow during 2020 – 2021. During this remote time she sought to interrogate digital tools for public participation and to document in-the-wild digital curation practices as a way to reduce the effects of pseudo-participation by/for design. Victoria argues that technologies are reconfiguring what being a citizen means. On the internet, we are all “users”, and users exist as long as the tool they use exists. Online participation then becomes no longer a right, but a mere interaction. This is thus creating an imaginary relationship between us and our democracies, a relationship driven by the mental models of the technologists in charge.
During this talk Victoria will introduce the ongoing projects she started during her fellowship. These include OtroCovid (A longitudinal study of 5 International “hackathons” and 6142 projects developed in a distributed manner in response to the pandemic) and Participatory Budgeting Configurations (A study of the configurations of participation in 50 Decidim instances of participatory budgeting). She will also talk about her plans for the upcoming 2021 – 2022 as an associate fellow of the DCI.