Mariangela Veikou

The project raises the question that emerges about the tense interplay between digital technology, citizenship and inclusivity: How the government, and as an extention the civil registries, appropriate and use digital technologies, and to what extent can these appropriations counter or undermine the logics and politics of inclusion as entailed in representational categories of non citizens.

This project draws attention to the civil registry identity categorisations in the Netherlands and explore some of the complexities surrounding the relationship between digitization and the, often absent dynamic in policy, debates about inclusivity.

The project is concerned with identifying the ideological techno-parameters that inform cultural categories in civil registries, so that their implications will not be as unrepresentative of certain populations (ie. race, ethnic background, etc.).

This is a matter of research to be fed into social policy, which assumes a critical, decolonial perspective, by which old systems of power, revolving around the racialisation and categorisation of people, can now be questioned and possibly dismantled.

This project examines these challenges, as key debates in digital citizenship, and seeks to pry open some of these issues through:

• contextualising socially debates and approaches to race and citizenship;
• adopting a socio-technical lense, that understands digital technologies not as neutral platforms but as powerful actors in these debates; and
• anchoring these debates to specific policy decisions that have important ramifications.

The ultimate goal is to provide insights  for policy-making for the Municipality of Amsterdam in order to stimulate exchange of knowledge, science communication and collaboration to increase an inclusive impact of policies by ‘design’ in civil registries.