5th ACM Europe Digital Humanism Summer School
Democracy in the Digital Age
July 6th – 10th 2026
- All day event.
Important Information
- Application Deadline and Program Details are coming soon.
- Check back for updates!
Digitalization permeates all aspects of our lives. It offers the opportunity to implement participatory projects on a global scale, such as Wikipedia, but on the other hand, it causes radicalization and polarization and threatens political discourse. The rise of AI in its different forms presents further challenges and opportunities. Questions about regulation, digital sovereignty, but also participation and inclusion in the digital space are therefore central to democratic societies. They must understand the mechanisms of the digital economy and know how to make use of the potential of digitalization in order to stop techno-fascist developments.
Digital Humanism as an interdisciplinary field examines the complex interplay between digital technologies and humankind, with the aim of creating a better society and improving our lives. Digital Humanism foregrounds world-wide shared human values as the foundation for the direction in which technology should evolve. It recognizes that an interdisciplinary approach is necessary for understanding the ongoing Digital Transformation, and aims to break down disciplinary silos, integrating humanities, social, and technical sciences.
Building on the success of previous editions, the aim of the Summer School is to provide a learning environment and platform to explore, investigate and discuss key issues and latest developments related to the impact of Digital Technologies to democratic societies. Internationally renowned and leading academics from computer science, social sciences, law and humanities present and discuss important recent topics and themes, including:
Foundational issues: Foundational and philosophical issues of digital technologies and AI.
Democratic governance of AI and social media: Regulation, multistakeholder governance, collective control of systems and platforms, policy-making, technical implementation of values and constraints.
Civil society organizing in the digital age: Political communication, organizing of protest movements, the digital public sphere.
AI for democratic innovation: Algorithms for participatory democracy (incl. AI supported deliberation, participatory budgeting, citizen assemblies and sortition…)
Digital sovereignty: Privacy and security aspects, infrastructure and cloud services, data sovereignty.
Details
The Digital Humanism Summmer School 2026 will be co-located with the European Summer School on Artificial Intelligence (https://essai2026.eu/).
This will give students the chance to join additional sessions.
Supporters
We are grateful to the following companies and institutions:
In collaboration with the UNU AI Global Network
