DigID – Doing Digital Identities is a five-year research project funded by the European Research Council. The project is concerned with the ongoing shift towards digital identification devices by government authorities around the world.
This shift constitutes the most significant change in statist identification practices since the consolidation of the international passport regime in the 19th century. Digital ID devices like electronic eID cards providing remote access to government services, biometric databases, and blockchain-secured digital identity wallets are increasingly complementing, or even replacing, paper-based means of identification like passports or birth certificates.
The DigID project uses this unique moment of change to assess how the move towards digital ID devices affects the practical meaning and lived experience of citizenship—understood as a legal status, a form of membership in a political community, and a set of bottom-up practices for enacting social and political rights.
... read more