The Hopes of Digital Citizenship: What Can We Learn from Latin America?

What is digital citizenship? The buzz word has been around for several years and people interpret it differently. In general, it is conceptualized as the next evolutionary stage of citizenship – from civil to political to social/economic to digital citizenship. But little is known about how various organizations approach digital citizenship and how the concept really plays out. Dr. Luis Santana, Assistant Professor at the School of Communications & Journalism Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez in Santiago (Chile) and visiting scholar at the Center for Media Engagement’s Propaganda Research Lab will explain digital citizenship based on his research and hone in specifically on Latin America. He has published extensively on the topic and his work is driven by extrapolating from local insights into conceptual frameworks.

Dr Santana will be joined by Dr. Zachary Elkins, Associate Professor at the Department of Government and co-director of the Comparative Constitutions Project, a NSF-funded initiative to understand the causes and consequences of constitutional choice. Dr. Elkins will provide comments based on his extensive research on issues of democracy, institutional reform, and national identity, with an emphasis on cases in Latin America.

The second half of the event will be reserved for Q&A.

Dr. Samuel Woolley, Assistant Professor at the School of Journalism and Media and founder of the the Center for Media Engagement’s Propaganda Research Lab will give introductory remarks and Dr. Inga Trauthig of the Propaganda Research Lab will moderate the discussion.

Lunch will be served. The event will last 60 mins total.

Speaker Bios: 

Luis Santana

Luis E. Santana is an Assistant Professor at the School of Communications & Journalism and director of the Fostering Digital Citizenship program at Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez in Santiago, Chile. Additionally, he serves as a research associate at GobLab within the same institution. He holds a PhD in Communication and an MPA from University of Washington, Seattle. Between 2020 and 2023 Dr. Santana prepared two reports on Digital Citizenship for the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean. Currently is at the beginning of a three-year project (funded by the Chilean National Agency for R&D) focused on the sociability aspects and  norms of digital citizenship.  Dr. Santana has been during the last three years a member of the advisory council for the Office of the Ombudsperson for Children in Chile and he is part of the Global Kids Online researchers, contributing qualitative research in South America.

Zachary Elkins

Professor Elkins’ research focuses on issues of democracy, institutional reform, research methods, and national identity, with an emphasis on cases in Latin America. He is currently completing a book manuscript, Steal this Constitution: The Drift and Mastery of Constitutional Design, which examines the design and diffusion of democratic institutions.  Much of his research is on the origins and consequences of national constitutions.  With Tom Ginsburg (University of Chicago), Professor Elkins co-directs both the Comparative Constitutions Project, a NSF-funded initiative to understand the causes and consequences of constitutional choices, and the website Constitute, which provides resources and analysis for constitutional drafters in new democracies. Elkins earned his B.A. from Yale University, an M.A. from the University of Texas at Austin, and his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley.