Transnational Collaboration at the Digital Fontier: Knowledge travel across borders in the public sector digitalisation

The Transnational Collaboration at the Digital Frontier (in short: Digi Front) is a research project that starts from the premise that public sector digitalization is increasingly driven by transnational collaboration and asks how best practices of digital government travel across national contexts, and east kind of politically and culturally transformative effects this may have on national welfare states?

The circulating best practices of digital government have an unacknowledged political character, as the process of public digitalization does not just streamline the welfare state but also fundamentally transforms the internal working of the state as well as the relations to its citizens, the private sector and other countries. An STS-informed study, the project theorises public digitalization as a transnational network of artefacts, expertise , and events and ethnographically follows three countries deeply engaged in knowledge sharing.

Meet the team
Irina Papazu is associate professor in the Technologies in Practice research group at the IT-University in Copenhagen. She studies public sector digitalization in Denmark and abroad ethnographically. As PI in the project she is responsible for thinking across and considering synergies between the subprojects, and she will work closely with Tobias Pedersen with a focus on how Danish public digitalization is informed by and informs other countires’ digitalization efforts.

Jessamy Perriam is an associate professor in the Technologies in Practice research group at ITU and a senior lecturer in the School of Cybernetics at the Australian National University. She is co-PI on the Digi Front project and works primarily on the UK case study with a focus on how expertise shifts across national contexts and the events that bring practitioners and policymakers together around public sector digitalisation.

Alexei Tsinovoi is assistant professor of digital strategic communication at the department of Media Studies and Journalism, School of Communication and Culture, Aarhus University. He will be involved in the digital methods components of the project and conduct part of the ethnographic studies.

Anders Kristian Munk is professor of computational anthropology at the Section for Human-Centered Innovation, DTU Management. He is responsible for the digital methods components of the project and will work closely with Lasse Uhrskov Kristensen and Alexei Tsinovoi to map processes of transnational digitalization on platforms like GitHub, Hugging Face or LinkedIn.

Lasse Uhrskov Kristensen is a PhD student at the Section for Human-Centered Innovation, DTU Management. He is primarily involved with the Artefacts work package, and will collaborate closely with Anders Kristian Munk and Alexei Tsinovoi to map code sharing practices between government entitites on GitHub, Hugging Face, LinkedIn and more.

Tobias Pedersen is a PhD student studying how public digitalization expertise is ascribed value in the everyday practice of digitalization professionals, as well as how expertise and knowledge travels across borders and between public and private sectors.