The Digital Technology and Global Change initiative at the University of Pittsburgh’s Global Studies Center explores the transformative role of digital technologies in shaping global processes, identities, and inequalities. Digital innovations—from artificial intelligence and big data to social media platforms, surveillance systems, and digital finance—are remaking the ways people work, govern, communicate, and mobilize across borders. These changes present both extraordinary opportunities and profound challenges for democracy, justice, and sustainability.
This initiative approaches digital technology as both a driver and product of globalization. It investigates how technological systems are embedded in political economies, cultural practices, and historical legacies, and how they reshape human and non-human relations at scales ranging from the intimate to the planetary. Of particular concern are the ways in which digital technologies reproduce or disrupt inequalities—whether through algorithmic bias, unequal access to digital infrastructures, or the geopolitical competition over cyber security and technological sovereignty.
Key areas of focus include:
- Digital Inequalities: disparities in access, participation, and representation across lines of class, race, gender, and geography.
- Technology, Governance, and Democracy: the role of digital platforms in elections, social movements, and the circulation of information and disinformation.
- Global Political Economy of Technology: supply chains of rare earth minerals, labor practices in the tech industry, and the financialization of data.
- Surveillance, Security, and Human Rights: how states, corporations, and international actors use technology to monitor, regulate, and control populations.
- Cultural and Social Transformations: the impact of digital tools on identity, communication, and global solidarity, as well as the creative and artistic uses of technology in expressing alternative futures.
- Sustainability and the Environment: the ecological footprint of digital technologies, including e-waste, energy consumption, and their role in climate adaptation and mitigation.
The initiative will bring together faculty, students, policymakers, and practitioners from across disciplines to examine the intersections of digital technology and global change. Through collaborative research, teaching, public programming, and partnerships, it will foster critical and creative approaches to understanding how digital technologies are reshaping global life—and how we might harness them for more equitable and sustainable futures.