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In 2022, the British Academy commissioned six projects that examined different aspects of digital poverty in the UK, to draw upon the vital insights from the SHAPE disciplines (social sciences, humanities, and the arts for people and the economy) to inform policy thinking around the crucial challenge of addressing inequality – and specifically, the relationship between digital technology and inequality – across the UK. As digital technology has become increasingly integrated with modern life, the ability to digitally engage has become more and more essential to interacting fully with society and the economy. Systems and services in both public and private contexts are shifting their focus to online forms of delivery, and while this brings new opportunities for social impact and benefit, it also risks creating new challenges and exacerbating inequalities for those who lack the capacity to digitally engage, whether due to insufficient access, skills, resources, or motivation. Disparities in levels and types of digital access, digital skills, usage, and outcomes exist across the UK, aligning with the ‘three levels’ of the digital divide: poor access to digital technologies (first level), poor digital literacy and skills (second level), and a reduced ability to exploit digital resources and transform them into tangible social benefits (third level). We note the Digital Poverty Alliance’s definition of ‘digital poverty’ as “the inability to interact with the online world fully, when, where, and how an individual needs to.” As we discuss in this report, inequalities and technologies are both subject to change over time, so it is important to have a flexible definition – the shape of digital poverty may look different from place to place and time to time. We recognise that a variety of contested terms exist in this space, such as digital exclusion and inclusion, digital inequality, digital poverty, and the digital divide. We see the lessons in this report as relevant to un

This toolkit shares social science research insights from the MANY (Mobile Access North Yorkshire) project: working to put 5G connectivity infrastructures in place for very rural communities. The toolkit is designed to guide project managers and those in roles seeking to directly engage with communities in difficult and sometimes controversial projects. The toolkit is divided into three elements - themes (foundational elements for community engagement), principles (what community engagement is trying to achieve) and methods (how to achieve it). You can see how the Themes, Principles and Methods all fit together, ‘in a nutshell’, in the Toolkit Matrix (page 35) and how the methods are underpinned by the principles and themes. The toolkit is designed to help you use community engagement insights (themes, principles and methods) to shape your project, deliver real value, and put your own action plan in place.

The purpose of this document is to share social science research insights, generated through work with the Mobile Access North Yorkshire (MANY) project, in order to develop best practice, generate discussion for future collaborative work, and work out our collective next steps that might better achieve our aim: to help very rural communities achieve socio-economic flourishing through improved connectivity. We define ‘flourishing’ as improvements in wellbeing, business innovation and the safety and resilience of connected communities and use this as our overarching aim of our work. More specifically, we define improved wellbeing as reductions in self-perceived levels of harm, loneliness, and improvements in social connections and mental health; improved business innovation as improvements in practice that contribute to the business growth and/or improvements in productivity and/or (public) service offering (i.e. using a reduced resource for the same output); and improved safety and resilience as improvements in the timeliness and quality of information provided at critical decision-making junctures. We are working across three domains of action, the technology innovation domain, the technology-in-use domain, and in the middle, the institutional domain to identify opportunities for intervention. We are working across these domains to help people co-produce connectivity solutions that work in place: in a very rural community.

This toolkit shares social science research insights from the MANY (Mobile Access North Yorkshire) project: working to put 5G connectivity infrastructures in place for very rural communities. The toolkit is designed to guide project managers and those in roles seeking to directly engage with communities in difficult and sometimes controversial projects. The toolkit is divided into three elements - themes (foundational elements for community engagement), principles (what community engagement is trying to achieve) and methods (how to achieve it). You can see how the Themes, Principles and Methods all fit together, ‘in a nutshell’, in the Toolkit Matrix (page 35) and how the methods are underpinned by the principles and themes. The toolkit is designed to help you use community engagement insights (themes, principles and methods) to shape your project, deliver real value, and put your own action plan in place.

Research shows that students starting higher education (HE) often lack an essential level of information literacy (IL). To address this issue, a growing number of Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) engage with schools through Information Literacy Outreach Programmes (ILOPs). This paper explores the forces and motivations behind how and why HEIs engage with schools through ILOPs, and discusses their impact on beneficiaries.

This paper breaks new ground by revealing and conceptualising the infrastructuring of moral markets as a process that aggregates and integrates experimental sociomaterial practices through the construction and use of local and global knowledge architectures. We follow the moral market infrastructuring work of a project conceptualised as a market intervention to make high quality digital connectivity services accessible to excluded communities in very rural places: making imperfect markets, (more) perfect. In contrast with market studies that focus on the structuring of moral markets, this study explicates the sociomaterial practices that sit beneath such markets, sediment-ing moralities into the infrastructures of markets. In so doing, we characterise the infrastructuring work of moral market-makers, and the construction of different forms of knowledge architectures as a key element of that work. Finally, we reveal how these knowledge architectures capture, reused reform and sediment experimental sociomaterial practices, through the aggregation and integration of moral market action.