Imagining together at the 2025 summer school, Seonaid Lafferty
Seonaid Lafferty talks about her experience of the 2025 Digital Good Network summer school. Published 29 July 2025.
When I decided to apply for the Digital Good Network Summer School, it was with a quiet hope – for synchronicity, new connections, and for a way to amplify the often-unseen threads linking my academic research with professional practice. I knew there was something worth exploring, even if I couldn’t name it yet. I came away with clarity, energy and a new, nurturing community.
Across three fulfilling days, the Summer School offered a dynamic blend of talks and interactive sessions creating a social sandbox where early career researchers from a diversity of disciplines and lived experiences could share ideas and create new ones. Ros William’s Welcome talk set the framing with Ruha Benjamin’s powerful provocation: “Remember to imagine and craft the worlds you cannot live without, just as you dismantle the ones you cannot live within”.
This invitation set the tone for what followed, a web (or karabirrdt, as described by Alex Cosmo de Mesquita in his session on ‘Dragon Dreaming’) of interconnected themes that challenged dominant paradigms of knowledge, design, and data. Together, we explored how our research can hold space for nuance, critique, and radical hope. The programme encouraged us to step beyond linear, goal-oriented thinking into more creative terrains. Design was reframed not as innovation for its own sake, but as a deeply intentional process rooted in shared purpose. This shift prompted deeper questions: not just how we build digital futures, but why, with whom, and for what purpose.
The sessions challenged individualist and anthropocentric assumptions, instead, exploring relational ontologies: ways of knowing grounded in mutuality, interdependence, and situated knowledge. Through frameworks like posthumanism and the pluriverse, we were reminded that knowledge is something emergent, arising through entangled relationships between humans, technologies, ecologies, and more-than-human worlds.
Care was a recurring theme – not as sentiment, but as an ethical imperative. In the face of intersecting crises, we were reminded of our responsibility to embed care in our research practices, while also acknowledging the complexities and limitations or participatory research. As Anissa Tanweer reminded us, “Good doesn’t come cheap or fast”. The transition and trajectory to digital is not a race towards accumulation, but a process – grounded in sufficiency, equity, and co-design. This was highlighted in Dorothea Kleine’s keynote, which challenged us to centre inclusion and ecological limits over efficiency and to rethink success through the lens of social justice and collective agency.
Theoretical talks were punctuated by participatory workshops where we mapped, sculpted (with Play-Doh!), and co-created meaning together. Dylan Yamada-Rice’s session emphasised participant agency and creative control in research, while Susan Lechelt’s co-design session highlighted the limitations of big data and the value of thick, emotionally rich, participatory approaches. There were alternative sessions running in parallel with a rich HCI offer.
As I move forward in my work, I carry not just new questions and frameworks, but a renewed sense of agency, and the grounding presence of a community I will continue to grow with, challenge (and be challenged by!) and imagine alongside.
About the author
Seonaid Lafferty
PhD researcher, Lancaster University
Seonaid Lafferty is a PhD researcher at the Lancaster University exploring festival sustainability through the lens of shared human values, relationality, and complexity. Her interdisciplinary work weaves together phenomenology, autoethnography, and critical theory to examine how festivals can act as liminal spaces for reimagining more just and sustainable futures. Seonaid’s research challenges extractive paradigms and champions values-led, community-rooted approaches to cultural and digital transformation. She is also engaged in civic data innovation through her work with the University of Liverpool Civic Health Innovation Labs, where she supports ethical, participatory models for digital health and social impact.