The Centre for Digital Citizens (CDC) will address emerging challenges of digital citizenship, taking an inclusive, participatory approach to the design and evaluation of new technologies and services that support 'smart', 'data-rich' living in urban, rural and coastal communities. Core to the Centre's work will be the incubation of sustainable 'Digital Social Innovations' (DSI) that will ensure digital technologies support diverse end-user communities and will have long-lasting social value and impact beyond the life of the Centre. Our technological innovations will be co-created between academic, industrial, public and third sector partners, with citizens supporting co-creation and delivery of research. Through these activities, CDC will incubate user-led social innovation and sustainable impact for the Digital Economy (DE), at scale, in ways that have previously been difficult to achieve. The CDC will build on a substantial joint legacy and critical mass of DE funded research between Newcastle and Northumbria universities, developing the trajectory of work demonstrated in our highly successful Social Inclusion for the Digital Economy (SIDE) hub, our Digital Civics Centre for Doctoral Training and our Digital Economy Research Centre (DERC). The CDC is a response to recent research that has challenged simplified notions of the smart urban environment and its inhabitants, and highlighted the risks of emerging algorithmic and automated futures. The Centre will leverage our pioneering participatory design and co-creative research, our expertise in digital participatory platforms and data-driven technologies, to deliver new kinds of innovation for the DE, that empowers citizens. The CDC will focus on four critical Citizen Challenge areas arising from our prior work: 'The Well Citizen' addresses how use of shared personal data, and publicly available large-scale data, can inform citizens' self-awareness of personal health and wellbeing, of health inequalities, and of broader environmental and community wellbeing; 'The Safe Citizen' critically examines online and offline safety, including issues around algorithmic social justice and the role of new data technologies in supporting fair, secure and equitable societies; 'The Connected Citizen' explores next-generation citizen-led digital public services, which can support and sustain civic engagement and action in communities, and engagement in wider socio-political issues through new sustainable (openly managed) digital platforms; and 'The Ageless Citizen' investigates opportunities for technology-enhanced lifelong learning and opportunities for intergenerational engagement and technologies to support growth across an entire lifecourse. CDC pilot projects will be spread across the urban, rural and costal geography of the North East of England, embedded in communities with diverse socio-economic profiles and needs. Driving our programme to address these challenges is our 'Engaged Citizen Commissioning Framework'. This framework will support citizens' active engagement in the co-creation of research and critical inquiry. The framework will use design-led 'initiation mechanisms' (e.g. participatory design workshops, hackathons, community events, citizen labs, open innovation and co-production platform experiments) to support the co-creation of research activities. Our 'Innovation Fellows' (postdoctoral researchers) will engage in a 24-month social innovation programme within the CDC. They will pilot DSI projects as part of highly interdisciplinary, multi-stakeholder teams, including academics and end-users (e.g. Community Groups, NGO's, Charities, Government, and Industry partners). The outcome of these pilots will be the development of further collaborative bids (Research Council / Innovate UK / Charity / Industry funded), venture capital pitches, spin-outs and/or social enterprises. In this way the Centre will act as a catalyst for future innovation-focused DE activity.

This project investigates the capacity of volunteering to reduce inequalities experienced by displaced youths in Uganda and to build their skills and employability. Forced displacement has become one of the most intractable challenges of the 21st century, with 65.6 million people displaced worldwide at the end of 2016 - a number which is predicted to rise further in the coming years. 1.4 million of these refugees are currently seeking refuge in Uganda, fleeing from conflicts in the Central African countries of South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Burundi, and Somalia to the east. The majority of these refugees are children, and so building the skills and employability of the many young people (understood in this research as aged 15 - 25) - caught up in this crisis is critical not only to their own future prospects, but to the long-term stability of their host country and region. Often, however, economic and other inequalities will exclude young refugees from formal schooling and wider opportunities for skills acquisition; while they will also frequently "fall through the cracks" of humanitarian programming. Many, though, are engaged in volunteering, a practice increasingly identified with building skills and enhancing employability. Thus, the aim of this research is to develop a new conceptual framework and produce a body of data and evidence for critically analysing whether volunteering by displaced youths in Uganda helps their skills acquisition and employability and reduces the inequalities they experience. The project will take an interdisciplinary (Youth Studies, Volunteering Studies, Refugee Studies, Urban Studies and Development Studies) mixed method approach, and establish and exploit collaborative links with global South refugee NGOs, volunteers and leading global volunteering and development actors. Fieldwork will be conducted in four case study regions - Kampala city, North Western Uganda, South Uganda, where two of the populations are in the same district, and South West Uganda - and proceed through the following three phases. In Phase 1, the research team will carry out a series of workshops, key informant interviews and field visits in order to build stakeholder engagement, refine and confirm the impact plan, and establish an initial typology of forms and understandings of volunteering to inform the large-scale quantitative survey in phase 2. In Phase 2, the research team will design, develop, pilot and launch a large quantitative survey of young refugees involved in volunteering. Preliminary analysis of the data arising from this survey will inform the questions and focus of phase 3. Comprising 6 main activities - participatory mapping, participatory photography, one to one semi-structured interviews, life history interviews, and stakeholder interviews - Phase 3 will deepen our understanding of where and how young refugees volunteer, address the factors shaping volunteering activity, and its impacts on skills acquisition and employability. The main outputs from the project will include 10 international peer-reviewed journal articles; presentations at major national and international conferences; a project website, containing findings, updates and working notes targeted at different audiences; a compendium of policy briefings; a (touring) photographic exhibition (and accompanying booklet), drawing on images solicited in the context of the participatory photography exercise; and a volunteering for skills acquisition and employability toolkit. By developing a conceptual framework and body of data and evidence on the impact of volunteering by displaced youths in Uganda on skills acquisition, employability and inequality, the research will contribute directly to knowledge which supports how creative solutions to meeting the Sustainable Development Goal challenges work with programmes to develop education and skills.