Digital Good Network Summer School

What is the Digital Good Network Summer School?

The Digital Good Network Summer School provides a fully funded opportunity for PhD researchers to engage with a range of theoretical, methodological and professional development topics relating to the digital good.

It is an annual face-to-face residential program hosted at the University of Sheffield. It includes lectures, workshops, sprints and other activities delivered by leading digital society researchers and practitioners from a range of industries and sectors.

The summer school includes opportunities to engage with interdisciplinary scholarship, network with other doctoral students, and attend talks from leaders in their fields. This year, we anticipate a focus on methods for the digital good, drawing in researchers funded by the network to demonstrate innovative methods, tools and approaches.

As well as developing participants’ skills and capacity, the Digital Good Network Summer School aims to build our wider Digital Good Network. Attendees will have opportunities to network with leading researchers and practitioners, building potential future research collaborations.

Read first-hand experiences from attendees from the 2023, 2024, and 2025 summer schools.

Who can apply for the 2025 Summer School?

• You must be a current PhD student, must be researching digital society and must have a demonstrable interest in the digital good.
• We welcome applications from any discipline but your research should align with the Digital Good Network objectives.
• You must have completed your confirmation review/upgrade (which typically takes place at the end of the first year of full-time study) by the application deadline of 27 January 2025. This is so that attendees have a relatively advanced understanding of their research project, theoretical framework(s) and method(s). This is necessary because much of the Summer School is highly interactive and will require attendees to reflect back on their own research projects.
• If you’re applying from a country which does not have confirmation reviews you must have successfully completed your first year of study.
• If in your final year, your anticipated viva date should not be before the Summer School takes place.
• You do not need to be UKRI funded to apply.
• You must not have attended a previous Digital Good Network Summer School.
• We welcome applications from PhD students studying in the UK and also from PhD students studying in the Global Majority.

NB: The Digital Good Network is committed to spreading the network’s investments in a way that opens diverse channels of knowledge production and exchange. We use ‘Global Majority’ to refer to countries listed on the UK’s Overseas Development Assistance country recipients, listed here. Applicants who are studying their PhD in any one of these countries, would be considered for the ring-fenced awards.

Guidance for completing the application form

To apply, we require a supporting statement from an academic supporter. Your academic supporter can be your PhD supervisor, Director of Postgraduate Studies or Head of Department. In the statement, they must confirm that they support your application and attendance at the Summer School. They should explain why the Summer School would be valuable for you (eg, why it might benefit your project, or your personal and career development).

Please copy your academic supporter into the email when you send your application. If your PhD supervisor is not your academic supporter, please copy your PhD supervisor into the email too. We will send our confirmation of receipt of your application and our decision to them too.

You should also provide a summary of your PhD research. This should clarify what theories and methods you engage with (or plan to engage with) in your work. This will help us to ensure we have a diverse range of disciplinary perspectives and areas of research represented at the school.

We also ask for information about how your research relates to the Digital Good Network, and how attending the Summer School would benefit you and your research.

We’re interested to hear how your work might support our goals to build a more representative community of researchers (both in terms of EDI and interdisciplinarity). Feel free to share anything you feel might help to explain how your participation would help us to achieve this.

As part of your application, we will ask you and your team to fill out an Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Monitoring form. The information collected in this form will help us work towards our goal of building an inclusive and broad network.