Project R-16560

DigiDisc: Towards a multidimensional understanding of the digital neighborhood within the context of everyday discrimination (Research)

The digital neighborhood is an emerging concept within the field of digital youth cultures that addresses how digital media practices are embedded within both 'physical' and 'digital' neighborhood dynamics. The concept, however, remains undertheorized due to three interrelated knowledge gaps. First, the focus on large metropoles in the US brings the limitation of understanding the role of ethnicity and social class within European contexts. Second, studies mostly investigate 'spectacular' digital youth subcultures. Third, there is an absence of systematic quantitative mapping of youth's experiences of inequality, marginalization, and discrimination within digital neighborhoods. Our project aims to resolve these knowledge gaps by introducing Philomena Essed's analytic framework of everyday discrimination, which refers to manifestations of unequal treatment experienced by individuals based on their ethno-racial, gender, and socio-economic background. By adopting a mixed-method approach (hybrid ethnographic fieldwork and a longitudinal survey study), the project aims to (1) explore how everyday discrimination is embedded within the socio-cultural and technological structures of the digital neighborhood; and to (2) develop an adapted everyday discrimination scale to systematically examine the appearance, form, and occurrence of everyday discrimination across physical and digital spaces. The final goal is to substantiate an interdisciplinary digital neighborhood paradigm.

01 October 2026 - 30 September 2030