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This paper examines how authority and governmentality were enacted through digital technologies during the COVID-19 pandemic. Through the proliferation of track and trace apps, as well as digital vaccine passports, the contemporary ‘biocitizen’ became someone who was at once participatory and sacrificial for the ‘greater good’. Advancing a notion of sensory power (Isin and Ruppert, 2020) and app-enabled ‘biopolitical authority’ as a novel form of governmentality, this paper explores how the tracking and monitoring of individual bodies renders them ‘sense-able beings’ through the devices, apps, and platforms that they engage with. Drawing on a discourse-oriented analysis of UK-based government visuals and news reports surrounding the promotion (and controversies) of tracking apps and vaccine passports, we demonstrate that partaking in society as a ‘good’ biocitizen meant allowing COVID-19 technologies to pre-empt and influence bodily movements on both a micro and macro scale. As such we argue that COVID-19 technologies, ranging from tracking apps to vaccine passports, became ‘pre-emptive’ technologies that codified human bodies and their infectious status through alerts and notifications, which in turn, validated and reified a sense of belonging as a good and healthy ‘biocitizen’. This paper will unpack these themes to propose ways in which sensory power was deployed to organise and structure societies, first at a responsibilised individual level, and then as a societal collective, throughout the pandemic. In doing so, this paper seeks to address the varying forms of control that came out of the pandemic, as well as the social implications that they then had on biocitizenship and belonging.

This article contributes to an emerging field of ‘urban communication’ research and its intersections with civic culture and digital citizenship. It does so by presenting a case study of how an activist group in North London’s Tottenham region co-designed bespoke digital media platforms, akin to civic media, to advocate an approach to urban planning that also recognizes migrants’ rights. Conducted as a part of a broader participatory action research project, the study outlined here offers an analysis of the online and offline communicative routes taken, the urban rights enacted and the visions expressed during an eight-week consultation period. Drawing on both quantitative and qualitative metrics from the official and alternative digital platforms inviting consultation around the community-led planning application, the article offers insights about the co-construction of space, and the effect that the particular site had in unearthing wider enactments of ‘the right to the city’ and affective belonging, alongside struggles against threats of displacement. By offering these insights, the study contributes to a better understanding of the digital mediation of belonging through space/place and what this means for urban citizenship. Looking beyond processes of urban planning, this understanding seeks to contribute to wider debates of urban citizenship, often expressed at the intersection of urban rights, digital citizenship and virtual reality.