Special Issue on Distributed Citizenship: International Workshop

In connection with PREPARE’s call for papers for the special issue on Distributed Citizenship in The International Journal of Communication, the PREPARE team has had the joy of inviting 15 scholars from around the globe to the University of Bergen to participate in a two-day workshop on their research on how contemporary democratic engagement is practiced, organized, and mediated.

The team behind the PREPARE research project is co-editing the special issue “Distributed Citizenship: Sharing, Shifting, and Appropriating the Chores of Democracy Across Platforms, Networks, and Infrastructures”. On this occasion, the team invited scholars and potential contributors from the Netherlands, Belgium, Sweden, Hungary, Austria, Hong Kong, India, Canada and the US to a workshop on Distributed Citizenship. The workshop was hosted and led by UiB’s Professor Hallvard Moe and Assistant Professor Emilija Gagrčin (University of Bremen), and took place from 5 March to 6 March 2026. 

In the workshop, the participants explored when citizens’ distribution of democratic work empowers citizens and when it entrenches inequality by presenting their work on issues around political identity, news avoidance, social media influencers, surveillance technology, citizens’ digital mobilization and navigation of propaganda – to name just a few of the many insightful topic areas illuminated in this workshop – with focus on cases in East and Southeast Asia, Africa, the US, as well as Europe.

With backgrounds in user experience, design of democratic infrastructures, digital activism, gender and queer studies, transnational media consumption and socio-technical systems the participants contributed with engaging research and helped to improve each other’s work. 

This has been an incredibly rewarding and overall delightful experience with difficult goodbyes. The PREPARE team is even more so looking forward to seeing how the workshop participants’ research on Distributed Citizenship develops in their final paper submissions.