About ReDigIm

Project overview

Across Europe, citizens are increasingly using digital tools such as websites, apps, payment technologies and social media to engage in practices of giving, sharing and donating.

These new forms of prosocial contribution point to novel modes of citizen participation, solidarity and care for others, but they are also disruptive of established state-mandated forms of social provisioning, raising questions about the future of taxation systems in European welfare states.

ReDigIm examines citizens’ engagement with digital opportunities for prosocial contribution. We investigate the collective, common-sense understandings of redistribution that inform and give meaning to these practices, which we describe as redistributive imaginaries.

By analysing five national contexts representing different welfare state models and philanthropic traditions – UK, Switzerland, Finland, Spain and Montenegro – the project uncovers redistributive imaginaries that organise meaning and practices of contribution and care across Europe, and considers the implications of these imaginaries for the funding, organisation and delivery of welfare provision in the future.

Research approach

Located in cultural sociology, media and cultural studies, and social and cultural anthropology, the research team has formulated a qualitative, mixed-methods research approach comprised of four work packages:

• A discourse analysis of news media and policy texts to identify the values attributed to the digital in public debate about prosocial contribution.
• An affordance analysis to establish the features, functions and interactive possibilities of digital platforms designed or used for prosocial contribution.
• Interviews and participant observation with civil society groups to explore how citizens engage with and make sense of digitally-mediated forms of prosocial contribution.
• Stakeholder workshops to deliberate the redistributive imaginaries the project has identified and to draw out the implications for policy and practice.

This innovative approach delivers novel insights that advance the study of redistribution and are of value to a range of stakeholder audiences.