Courses spring semester '26Published on 16.02.2026
The Digital Society course offer for spring 2026
In the spring semester 2026, the Digital Society Master offers a variety of courses exploring current debates around digitalisation, combining critical perspectives with concrete methodological and analytical skills.
- Perspectives in the Social Studies of Technology (course à 3 ECTS credits)
How do technologies shape society and how does society shapes technologies? Introducing key STS concepts, platform and algorithmic politics, data feminism, and AI futures. ->learn more - Digital Methods (seminar à 3 ECTS credits with an optional seminar paper à 6 ECTS credits)
This seminar introduces digital methods through controversy mapping and the ethnography of digital work, combining quantitative and qualitative approaches. Students learn to scrape, visualize, and interpret web data and to conduct qualitative analyses of digital labor, culminating in a group poster project. ->learn more - Digital Objects, Internet Cultures, and Epistemic Authority (course à 3 ECTS credits)
How do digital infrastructures, internet cultures, and social practices shape public ideas of truth and credible knowledge?Tracing how platforms, users, and epistemic norms co‑produce today’s information environments. ->learn more - Challenging Digital Society (seminar à 3 ECTS credits with an optional seminar paper à 6 ECTS credits)
How do social movements use digital tools and how do people resist, subvert, or refuse them? From social media activism and hacking to protests against digital capitalism, AI, and surveillance, focusing on political imagination and shifting power relations in digital society. ->learn more - From Censorship to Algorithms: Politics, Religion and Culture (course à 3 ECTS credits)
How does power shape what can be seen, said, and believed, from historical religious and state censorship to contemporary platform moderation and “cancel culture”? Analyzing algorithms, surveillance economies, and cultural debates to question what freedom means when control often takes the form of optimization. ->learn more
Depending on the course and programme specifications, they are compulsory or elective. If you are interested in taking them and unsure about how to proceed, please visit the Digital Society website (https://human-ist.unifr.ch/digitalsociety/) or contact the Digital Society study advisor to learn your options.
On the course overview page you will also find other optional courses for Digital Society master students, including:
- Digital Well-being
- Business Communication
- Digital Humanities introduction
- Methods with R
The Digital Society master programme is a Master programme at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland (degree: M.A. in Digital Society). It is an interdisciplinary study programme focusing on the social dimensions and consequences of digital technology in today's societies.
The programme is offered in cooperation with the Department of Social Sciences, the Department of Social Work, Social Policy and Global Development, and the Interfaculty Human-IST Institute of the University of Fribourg.