Missions

Digital technologies are rapidly transforming our societies and are the subject of intense debate. Some see great promise for democratic participation, collective organization and knowledge production. Others foresee catastrophe, from the collapse of democracies and rampant disinformation to the replacement of humans by machines. These visions share a common thread: the belief that the social sphere is entirely shaped by its technical environment. The humanities and social sciences have a responsibility in these debates to defend a more nuanced perspective that places these technologies within a broader social, political and cultural contexts. 

The main mission of the Open Institute for Digital Transformations is to re-examine the digital world from a social sciences perspective. Created as a part of TIERED, a transformative institutional project financed by the French National Research Agency, the Institute coordinates and highlights the university's work in teaching, research, and public outreach on digital transformations. It draws on historical, economic, legal, sociological, and political analyses to understand and explain the transformations brought about by digital innovations, and to examine how technologies themselves adapt to societal changes. 

The Open Institute defends an alternative vision of digital technologies and their societal impact, reflecting a French and European approach driven by democratic values. It aims to build a constructive discourse which is critical of digital technologies and services, yet open to the opportunities they offer. To do so, it works not only with the humanities and social sciences, but also with other scientific disciplines (including via the TIERED project partners) to study technologies and the knowledge behind them, alongside the people who produce data and design algorithms.

Building on Sciences Po's history of examining these challenges, the Open Institute for Digital Transformations offers research and academic opportunities that combine an understanding of technical tools and with an analysis of their impact. This reinforces Sciences Po's position as a unique and influential player in the French, European and global technological landscape.

OBJECTIVES

• Define and promote Sciences Po's unique perspective on digital transformations by giving visibility and coherence to existing initiatives.
• Reinforce research on and with digital technologies to make Sciences Po a leading research university in the humanities and social sciences on what digital transformations mean for democracies.
• Foster an interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary dialogue on this topic, both across Sciences Po's traditional disciplines and in collaboration with the other scientific fields.
• Strengthen the educational offer to give all students, across all programmes and at every stage of their studies, training on digital challenges and practical skills. 
• Contribute to a new approach to sharing and promoting knowledge through open science, engagement in public debate, and involving the public in research.

THEMES

Five priority themes guide the Open Institute's interdisciplinary work for the period 2025-2028:

• Digital inequalities: Far from the objective neutrality they promise, AI algorithms and prediction tools pose serious fariness problems of equity in many fields, from health to education to public administration. The opacity of their methods reinforces the feeling that these algorithms are “black boxes”. This theme looks at how we can understand, evaluate, and combat these inequalities.
• Digital participation: This theme focuses on describing new forms of political participation, whether they result from technology-mediated deliberation or from online mobilization and spontaneous public expression. It follows the transformation of political life in a context of growing mistrust in representative democracy, and asks how opinions and new political forms are structured in transnational digital spaces. It also examines the impact of disinformation and polarization on the legitimacy of elections.
• Digital traces for the social sciences: Social data are no longer reduced to statistics produced by state agencies. In the digital age, it is everywhere. This raises not only theoretical questions for the social sciences, but also legal questions concerning access to such data. 
• AI and society: This cross-cutting theme examines AI both as an object of study for the humanities and social sciences, from sociology to economics, law to cultural studies, and as a research tool for analyzing and using social science data.
• Politicization of science: Scientific expertise, and scientific institutions more broadly, are increasingly contested and enmeshed in social and political issues. The aim of this theme is to understand the new interactions being established between science and society in a wide range of fields.