DigID - Doing Digital Identities

Project Information

DigID

Grant agreement ID: 101039758

DOI

10.3030/101039758

EC signature date 18 July 2022

Start date 1 February 2023

End date 31 January 2028

Funded under

• European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 1 495 050,00

EU contribution

€ 1 495 050,00

Coordinated by

LEUPHANA UNIVERSITAT LUNEBURG
Germany

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - DigID (DigID - Doing Digital Identities)

Reporting period: 2023-02-01 to 2025-07-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

"DigID – Doing Digital Identities" is a five-year research project which is concerned with the ongoing shift towards digital identification devices by government authorities around the world. This shift constitutes the most significant change in statist identification practices since the consolidation of the international passport regime in the 19th century. Digital ID devices like electronic eID cards providing remote access to government services, biometric databases, and blockchain-secured digital identity wallets are increasingly complementing, or even replacing, paper-based means of identification like passports or birth certificates. The DigID project uses this unique moment of change to assess how the move towards digital ID devices affects the practical meaning and lived experience of citizenship—understood as a legal status, a form of membership in a political community, and a set of bottom-up practices for enacting social and political rights.To this end, a team of five researchers engages with two interrelated research questions: First, how does the digitization of identification practices reconfigure the transactions and relations between citizens and state authorities? And second, how does the move towards digital ID devices reshape the material dimension of citizenship, that is, the material artefacts and infrastructures that are use to enact citizenship as a form of belonging to a political community, a formal relation to the state and a democratic practice?

The project will engage with these questions in relation to three moments of identification that are central for the practical meaning and lived experience of citizenship: (1) Birth registration (the moment when human beings are translated into citizens of a particular nation-state); (2) Border controls (understood as sites where citizens are granted access to the state’s territory and distinctions between citizens and non-citizens are drawn); and (3) mundane Citizen-state transactions to enact social and political rights in the context of education, healthcare, voting and welfare (traditionally understood as the conceptual core of citizenship). Methodologically, the DigID project combines multi-sited ethnographies, textual analysis, and mapping to study the design, implementation, and practical use of digital ID devices in one international and five national case studies, namely: Estonia, Germany, Indonesia, Malawi and Sierra Leone.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

The projet's research topic - the digitzation of statist identification practices - concerns a key practice of statecraft that is central to the reproduction of state-power. Statist identification practices turn individuals - via the recording into state-owned registration and documentation systems - into re-identifiable, traceable and thus governable subjects. Due to the sensitive nature of the research topic, one outcome of the ERC ethics review required the DigID-project to obtain ethical clearance from national ethics committees in all five country case studies. Hence, a first major achievement of the project resides in satisfying this requirement during the reporting period. The second, related major achievement resides in the begining of ethnographic fieldwork in four of the five country case studies during the reporting peroid. In this context it should be noted that the project's Principal Investigator (PI) were successful with negotiating field access for participant observations and interviews at national registration authorities in three of the five country cases studies, namely: the National Civil Registration Authority (NCRA) in Sierra Leone, the National Registration Bureau (NRB) in Malawi and the Information System Authority (RIA) in Estonia. Conducting a collaborative team-ethnography - the principal research methodology of the project - also required the development of shared working practices for fieldwork and the processing of research data, as well as shared templates for recording interview and fieldnotes and consent forms. It also required the set-up of shared research infrastructures, such as a shared database for literature relevant to the project's research (Zotero) and a shared database for interview and fieldwork notes and other primary sources in the qualitative data analysis software NVivo. All these important preparatory steps were accomplished during the reporting period. In addition, some team members already published first research outputs - four articles in international peer-reviewed journals - on project-related issues and topics.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

During the reporting period the project's PI, Prof. Stephan Scheel, published a special issue that he has co-edided together with Nina Amelung (University of Lisboa) and Rogier van Reekum (University of Rotterdam). The co-authored special issue (SI) introduction (and the contributions to the special issue) on ‘Reinventing the politics of knowledge production in migration studies’ will have a profound impact on the field, shaping cutting-edge debates, since the SI is one of the first attempts to bring to bear insights, approaches and ontological assumptions of STS in the field of migration studies. In particular, the special issue introduction advances a conception of knowledge practices as performative while introducing a range of new concepts – such as the notion of control knowledge – which will significantly inform research and shape debates within critical and reflexive migration studies in the years to come. This is illustrated by the fact that the SI introduction is currently listed as one of the most read articles on the starting page of the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, with 4373 reads since the date of publication at the time of writing i.e. 11th February 2025: https://www.tandfonline.com/journals/cjms20

The article on "dormant infrastructures" published by post-doctoral researcher Sindhunata Hargyono in the open-access journal "Roadsides" will also prove to be ground-breaking insofar as the notion of dormant infrastructures coined by Hargyono highlights the temporal and emotional dimensions of material infrastructures and related practices of infrastructuring. These dimensions have only received scant dimension in infrastructure studies so far, but will certainly inspire forthcoming research in the field, including research that we currently conduct in the DigID project in regard to the transformation of material citizenship implicated by processes of digitzation of statist identification practices and related registration and e-governance systems.