Off-campus UMass Amherst users: To download campus access dissertations, please use the following link to log into our proxy server with your UMass Amherst user name and password.
Non-UMass Amherst users: Please talk to your librarian about requesting this dissertation through interlibrary loan.
Dissertations that have an embargo placed on them will not be available to anyone until the embargo expires.
Author ORCID Identifier
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9086-6355
AccessType
Open Access Dissertation
Document Type
dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Degree Program
Communication
Year Degree Awarded
2023
Month Degree Awarded
May
First Advisor
Henry Geddes
Subject Categories
Communication | Communication Technology and New Media | Critical and Cultural Studies
Abstract
This dissertation focuses on ‘civic tech’, the global phenomenon of tech-based voluntary action of citizens emerging with the rise of the culture of openness and sharing and initiatives of open government data. What does the ‘civic’ of civic tech mean? And what makes civic tech democratic and democratizing? These questions have been rarely asked or conveniently understood with Western-based theories and cases of tech-oriented civic actions. Combining critical studies of technology and civic engagement with the emerging scholarship of digital citizenship, I use the concept of digital citizenship as a heuristic tool to examine how digital and data technologies intervene in the way we form our civic identities and act as citizens. Based on 15-months of ethnographic fieldwork (2017-19) with civic tech groups for civic hacking, data activism, and platform cooperativism in Seoul, South Korea, I provide empirical analysis on how civic hackers articulate their digital citizenship as a new form of civic identity overcoming the developmental nationalism. I also provide contextual explanations how the democratic potential of civic tech unfolds in civic hackers’ lifeworld through their everyday practices of civic tech confronting injustices and inequalities in Korea. I argue that grassroots civic hackers’ struggles to reconfigure the global hegemonic discourses of civic tech provide alternative epistemologies and practices to enable more equitable and decentralized democratic systems, which is increasingly important in the contemporary crisis of democracy and ongoing datafication in the world.
DOI
https://doi.org/10.7275/35097551
Recommended Citation
Yoo, Danbi, "Reconfiguring Digital Citizenship: Civic Hacking, Data Activism, and Democracy Platforms In South Korea" (2023). Doctoral Dissertations. 2875.
https://doi.org/10.7275/35097551
https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_2/2875
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.