Seminar: Digital Civics: Rethinking Citizenship and Community Advocacy in the Age of Datafication and genAI

As cities become increasingly datafied and algorithmically governed, the role of digital media in shaping civic participation, public voice, and community advocacy is more critical than ever. In this talk, Professor Marcus Foth explores the conceptual and practical groundwork that drives a national research collaboration between QUT and civil society organisations focused on participatory data practices, digital rights, and community empowerment. The talk introduces the notion of a Living Data Lab, that is, a participatory civic infrastructure designed to support data literacy and digital inclusion, community-led storytelling, and grassroots political advocacy backed by genAI. It responds to growing concerns about opaque data regimes, tokenistic engagement practices in urban planning, and the erosion of public trust by championing co-designed, accessible, and ethical alternatives to top-down smart city approaches. Drawing on years of interdisciplinary work across urban informatics, critical data studies, and digital civics, Prof. Foth reflects on how participatory approaches to data visualisation and advocacy can enable citizens to contest extractive data logics, defend civil liberties, and shape just urban futures. This talk offers timely provocations for scholars in media and communication studies, digital inclusion, and civic tech who are interested in reimagining digital civics in an era of genAI and datafication.

Bio

Marcus Foth is a Professor of Urban Informatics in the School of Design and a Chief Investigator in the QUT Digital Media Research Centre (DMRC), Faculty of Creative Industries, Education, and Social Justice, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia. For more than two decades, Marcus has led ubiquitous computing and interaction design research into interactive digital media, screen, mobile and smart city applications. Marcus founded the Urban Informatics Research Lab in 2006 and the QUT Design Lab in 2016. He is a founding member of the QUT More-than-Human Futures research group. Marcus has published more than 290 peer-reviewed publications. He is a Fellow of the Australian Computer Society and the Queensland Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Distinguished Member and Distinguished Speaker of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and currently serves on Australia’s national College of Experts.

Related readings

Mann, M., Mitchell, P., Foth, M., & Anastasiu, I. (2020). #BlockSidewalk to Barcelona: Technological sovereignty and the social license to operate smart cities. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 71(9), 1103–1115. https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.24387

Foth, M., Anastasiu, I., Mann, M., & Mitchell, P. (2021). From Automation to Autonomy: Technological Sovereignty for Better Data Care in Smart Cities. In B. T. Wang & C. M. Wang (Eds.), Automating Cities: Design, Construction, Operation and Future Impact(pp. 319–343). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-8670-5_13

Foth, M., Emamjome, F., Mitchell, P., & Rittenbruch, M. (2022). Spatial data in urban informatics: Contentions of the software-sorted city. In S. Carta (Ed.), Machine Learning and the City: Applications in Architecture and Urban Design (pp. 367–378). Wiley.https://doi.org/10.1002/9781119815075.ch28

Sheikh, H., Foth, M., & Mitchell, P. (2023). From Legislation to Obligation: Re-thinking Smart Urban Governance for Multispecies Justice. Urban Governance, 3(4), 259-268. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ugj.2023.09.003