SICSS-Graz

Key Details

• Event type: Summer school
• School dates: 15–26 September 2025
• Location: IDea_Lab, University of Graz (Austria)
• Hosted by: Complex Social & Computational Systems Lab (CS^2)
• Audience: Open to junior researchers and professionals interested in research and normative philosophy concerning democracy, social media, and governance. Basic programming experience (Python/R) is preferred.
• Application deadline: 23:59 Anywhere On Earth, April 13th 2025 EXTENDED: 23:59 Anywhere On Earth, April 20th 2025
• Decision notification: April 27th 2025
• Fees: the school is free to attend but transit and accomodation is not covered. Equity-based grants are available.

Feel free to download and distribute the school flyer here.

EXTENDED DEADLINE: We’ve extended the application deadline to 23:59 (Anywhere on Earth), April 20th. You can still expect to hear back by April 27th, but due to the high volume of applications, some decisions may be sent on a rolling basis. Regardless, we’ll make sure everyone receives an email by the 27th with an update on their application status.

The internet connects people at unprecedented scales, transforming centuries-old patterns of human communication and social organisation. This restructuring has led to all new sorts of social phenomena—from global networks of gamers and K-pop fans, to the targeted manipulation of political outcomes, and international movements like the Arab Spring, the Climate Strikes, Black Lives Matter, and MeToo. The internet changes how society can evolve, for better or worse.

Not only this, social media platforms wield unprecedented power: they control the infrastructure of public discourse, harvest intimate behavioural data, and operate with minimal transparency. Recent developments—including the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA), whistleblower revelations (e.g., Meta’s internal research on mental health harms), and election interference (e.g., the recent Romanian elections)—underscore the urgency of the crisis.

What does this mean for democracy, a centuries-old system of collective governance? Social media—barely two decades old—has rapidly reshaped the social foundations that democracy rests on. Can traditional democratic systems coexist with the new social fabric, or does their growing divergence demand radical systemic redesign?

Blending political philosophy and computational data science, our school starts from the conceptual foundations of democracy and builds up to contemporary discussions on the interactions between social media and democracy, the ethical role of science and scientists in the digital age, and finally, new ideas for the future of governance and social media.

DDNSF 2025 will be home to world-class scientists, philosophers, and thinkers of democracy and the digital public sphere. Confirmed speakers include:
Guest Experts

• Prof. Rasha Abdulla (Journalism and Mass Communication, The American University in Cairo, Egypt)
• Prof. Karoline Wiesner (Complex Systems, Potsdam University, Germany)
• Prof. Bernhard Rieder (New Media and Digital Culture, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands)
• Prof. Étienne Brown (Philosophy, San José State University, the United States)

Local Experts

• Prof. Jana Lasser (Computational social science)
• Nikolaus Poechhacker (Sociology)
• João Neto (Computational social science, physics)

Additional speakers will be announced in the coming months—stay tuned!

Who Should Apply?

This program is targeted to graduate students who:

• Research in computational social science, computer science, data science, or adjacent fields.
• Political science, philosophy, social science, with some background in programming.
• Want to critically examine technology’s societal role—without jargon or oversimplification.

We strongly prefer applicants with a background in at least basic coding skills (Python/R/Julia).

We will also consider strong applications from undergraduates, professional, or anyone else.

The application link can be found here.

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Schedule

Week 1: Lectures, tutorials, panels

Monday: Welcome Day

• Participants arrive to Graz
• We will get to know each other and the organising team
• Group dinner and activities

Tuesday: What is Democracy and Social Fabric?

• What democracy is, conceptually and empirically
• Key normative questions about democracy
• Understand democracy functionally: what does it do well, and not-so-well
• The evolution of democracy: how did we get here?
• How does social media link to democracy via civic discourse?

Wednesday: Social Media’s Impact on Democracy and Discourse

• Real examples of how social media facilitates, or hinders, collective-decision making
• How social media interacts with aspects of democracy, like political autonomy and free speech
• Understand the state of EU regulation towards social media platforms

Thursday: Conceptually and Ethically Sound Data Science

• The conceptual and ethical challenges of researching with social media data
• Conducting conceptually sound data science: explore advanced data science methods, such as building a large language model (LLM) and applying ethical considerations in its development

Friday: The Future of Governance & Social Media

• Understand some new ideas for governance and social media: from regulation to systemic change

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Week 2: Group project work

In Week 2, students will commence group projects. Groups are encouraged to pursue whatever ideas they might find interesting, however, we provide some initial suggestions:

• Social Simulation: Build an agent-based model (ABM) or game theoretic simulation to explore a toy democratic or social media system.
• Philosophical Inquiry: Unpack an interesting philosophical question, like an ethical dilemmas, relating to democracy and social media.
• Data Work: Pose research questions and analyse social media data to uncover trends, drawing from our in-house database (including all of Reddit, 4chan’s /pol/, Voat, Telegram, the .win network, HackerNews, Parler, and more).

We strongly encourage the following qualities:

• Think systemically: Address root causes, not symptoms (e.g., how recommender systems shape public discourse, not individual “bad actors”).
• Embrace interdisciplinary approaches: Merge technical, philosophical, and social science perspectives.
• Challenge yourself in new ways: If you’re not familiar with data science, try to learn and apply an advanced technique, or if you’re a data scientist, push yourself to try do some philosophy.

Supervisors will be available to projects to provide mentorship and technical assistance for accessing our datasets and applying advanced techniques.

By week’s end, groups will outline a clear vision for their project, ready to prototype, model, or analyse in subsequent weeks. Think boldly—this is your chance to reimagine the digital public sphere!