ERC Grant for Stephan Scheel’s project on digital ID devices and citizenship

Government authorities around the world are increasingly switching from paper-based methods of identification of their citizens (e.g., birth certificates and passports) to digital technologies such as biometric national ID cards offering remote access to government services or so-called digital identity wallets. The effects of this ongoing change on the lived experience and practical meaning of citizenship have not yet been sufficiently researched. Therefore, Stephan Scheel, who is Professor of Political Sociology at Leuphana University Lüneburg, engages with the following research question in the ERC-funded project “Doing Digital Identities” (DigID): How does the growing use of digital identification devices reshape the transactions and power relations between citizens and state authorities?  

Together with a team of two post-docs and two doctoral students, Prof. Scheel investigates the use of digital ID devices in the following three settings: 1. birth registration, 2. border controls and 3. mundane transactions between citizens and authorities such as applying for benefits, accessing healthcare, or enrolling in education. In this way, the DigID project sheds light on the much-neglected material dimension of citizenship and shows how digital ID devices reshape the lived experience of citizenship—understood as a legal status, a form of membership in a political community, and a set of bottom-up practices enacting the ‘right to have rights.’ The implications of digital methods of identification for citizen-state relations are studied in one international and five country case studies, namely: Germany, Estonia, Indonesia, Malawi, and Sierra Leone.

Scheel has been awarded an ERC Starting Grant for the DigID project with a funding amount of nearly 1.5 million euros. The project will run for a period of 5 years from February 2023 to January 2028. With Starting Grants, the European Research Council supports outstanding young scientists who are conducting cutting-edge research in their field.

Back to Project Overview