Department of Digital Sociology

The Department of Digital Sociology emerged out of the need to take a systematic look at various issues related to technological transformation, a phenomenon that is changing nearly all areas of people’s lives. And since sociologists have always been fascinated by revolutions and great social upheavals, the main research axis in our team is the digital revolution and its multifaceted impacts on various aspects of social life.

For us, digital technologies are both an object of research and a working tool. We develop new digital methods of social research (quantitative and qualitative, e.g. the use of natural language processing for discourse analysis focused on the early period of the pandemic, social modelling and digital ethnography) and apply them in our research projects. We also explore various theoretical concepts to select ones that will best describe the transformations of society enforced by new technologies and we apply them in our empirical research. By studying new phenomena and processes, we continue the theoretical and methodological traditions of “Sociology in Karowa Street” (where the Faculty of Sociology has been located), while our publications and projects contribute to international debates on the singularities of digital sociology as a new subdiscipline. We are enthusiastic about popularising science by teaching open online courses, giving interviews to the mass media and writing journalistic articles.

We also develop innovative teaching approaches. We discuss modern education methods, we undergo our own training and develop new teaching methods under international projects (Action for Computational Thinking in Social Sciences). We are co-authors of the “Digital Sociology” course in the second-cycle degree programme, where we experiment with various approaches to teaching and organisation of the study programme.

We also teach at the classic first- and second-cycle degree programmes in Sociology (Bachelor’s and Master’s level).

Members of our Department study and apply broadly understood digital technologies and their resonance in the social world.