I’m interested in the ways that the digital world, particularly social media, has had a major impact on our social and political worlds. Though this impact has been far from wholly positive, it also is something which marginalised groups has used to acquire increased agency and a sense of community. An explanation of this is of particular importance as, my hunch, is that many of the practices and institutions which made this possible are at risk due to generative AI.
Recognising Injustice in the Digital Public Sphere (RECIND)
RECIND is a major 2-year project co-financed by the European Commission and the Polish National Science Centre. Led by Dr Cillian Ó Fathaigh, the project has received €252,000 (1,166,243 zł) in funding to investigate the importance of the digital public sphere as a site for the recognition of contemporary injustices.
The project will bring together continental philosophy, feminist philosophy and the philosophy of technology to develop a framework for understanding online politics. The working hypothesis of RECIND is that recognition of injustices represents a major political function of the digital and that this takes place through the contestation of social norms.
The 4 main project goals are:
- Reconceive the public sphere through philosophies of vulnerability.
- Consider what has happened to the idea of community in the online space
- Describe new figures of belonging that surpass traditional conceptions of the citizen and the nation-state
- Argue for the importance of the digital public sphere as a site for the contestation of social norms and through this the recognition of injustice.
“Recognising Injustice in the Digital Public Sphere (RECIND)”, No. 2022/47/P/HS1/03172 (PI: Cillian Ó Fathaigh), is co-funded by the National Science Centre and the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement no. 945339.
RECIND BLOG
RECIND Blog – Wrapping Up
Blog #8 I am now concluding the final stages of the project and so this will be the last blog post, at least in this iteration. So for this post, I’ll wrap up some points and also pose some open questions that I’ll aim to develop in future research and writing. A key aim of…
Why *European* philosophy?
Blog 7 – 8 March One question that sometimes arises in relation to RECIND is why European philosophy should matter for a project on digital publics, social media activism, and the recognition of injustice? There may seem to be a mismatch. The project deals with very contemporary phenomena, rapidly changing technologies, and forms of communication…
Are Hashtags Concepts?
Blog #6: 4 March 2026 One of the more unusual questions that has emerged in this project is whether hashtags can function as concepts. At first glance, the answer might seem obviously negative. A hashtag looks too vague, too platform-bound, and too compressed to count as a concept in any serious philosophical sense. Concepts are…
Should Social Media Activism Have Limits?
Blog #5: 12 February 2026 Any serious account of the digital public sphere has to engage with the limits of social media activism. It is no longer adequate either to celebrate online mobilisation as inherently democratic or to dismiss it as empty performance. What matters is to ask more carefully what digital activism can do,…
Epistemic Injustice – Online
Blog #4 One of the ideas that has become increasingly important to my work on the digital public sphere is epistemic injustice. The term is now fairly widely used in philosophy, though it is often invoked very quickly, as if it simply meant being wronged in relation to knowledge. It does mean that, but the…
What WE have in Common?
Blog #3 Community: it is a word that appears everywhere in discussions of politics, social life, and digital culture, yet it often remains strangely vague. It is almost annoyingly present in political discourse. On social media platforms, the term is used constantly.. The word does important work, but it also tends to conceal the difficulty…
Public Sphere – Don’t be unreasonable!
Blog #2 One of the central questions in RECIND is whether the public sphere can still be understood primarily through the idea of rational debate. That model has been enormously influential. It continues to shape how we imagine public life, democratic legitimacy, and political participation. In that picture, the public sphere is where citizens exchange…
RECIND?
What’s RECIND? Blog Number #1: Welcome to the blog for RECIND: Recognising Injustice in the Digital Public Sphere. More and more often, people first come to understand an experience as an injustice online. Before anything is acknowledged by a a government, a newspaper, or some other established institution, it may already have been named on…
Cillian 