Digital Rights Projects: Collective Capacities for Democratizing Technology

Dhruv Deepak

Advisor: John G. Dale, PhD, Department of Sociology and Anthropology

Committee Members: Ben Manski, Manjusha Nair, Robert Axtell

Horizon Hall, #6325 and on Zoom
April 23, 2026, 12:00 PM to 01:30 PM

Abstract:

While social life is increasingly mediated by the digital economy, centralizing state and corporate power, community-led responses lack vocabularies for understanding how their interventions construct digital sovereignty as a collective, practical capacity. This dissertation examines how 43 community-led digital initiatives produce democratic practices, community wealth, and balanced navigation of competing priorities across local and trans-local scales. The research develops a unified theoretical framework comprising existing 'digital commonwealth' scholarship, a Design-Affordance-Sovereignty (D-A-S) analytical schema, an empirical conditions-outcomes architecture, and a digital sovereignty 'stack.' 

The relationships between conditions and outcomes are analyzed across organizational types, arguing that design choices, technological affordances, and sovereignty construction are connected through multiple recursive patterns. Those patterns are evident in 'digital rights projects': collective social formations of initiatives, their partners, movements, networks, and the democratic 'data relations' connecting them. The study is grounded in a decolonial public sociology standpoint that centers communities as knowledge producers and rights-holders. A qualitative content analysis of publicly available materials established the empirical foundation, while agent-based modeling computationally tested condition-outcome relationships and relational ecosystems. 

The analysis found that democratic practices require ongoing accountability architectures rooted in community ownership and participatory governance, that community wealth is both generated and circulated through collectively governed digital resources, and that navigation of complex priorities is a constitutive process through which digital rights projects themselves are produced. The initiatives' relational ecosystems profoundly shape the possibilities for constructing digital sovereignty. 

Consequently, this research contends that digital sovereignty consists of layers that nest and interoperate, forming an interdependent 'stack.' Central to this construction are democratic 'data relations': collectively governed relationships through which communities exercise stewardship over digital resources. The digital rights project carries implications for digital sociology, offering a perspective on how communities can construct democratic digital futures in an age of technological ubiquity and concentrated power.

Join us in person or on Zoom : https://gmu.zoom.us/j/94635229043?pwd=c58su33YUKnFbJwanZqTCL3dfL9bhb.1