The Edges Project is an innovative and interdisciplinary Ethnography Lab for Law, Digital Governance, and Society that pioneers empirical research to understand and address the transformative impact of digital technologies on regulation, law, and societal dynamics, bridging the gap between legal principles and social practice in the digital era.

Digital technologies are transforming social, economic, and political relations around the world. While some see these technologies as heralding a freer, more prosperous and democratic future, others see them as producing polarization, inequality and authoritarianism. To address the latter, legal and regulatory scholars have been working to reform and develop regulation to better address the digital future—from privacy to competition law. But while digital technologies may produce new “gaps” between legal principles and social practice, scholars also suggest that they are fundamentally reorienting the relationship between the state and society through the private digital infrastructures that are increasingly mediating social life. Digitization is modifying both the subjects and objects of governance, which increasingly operates through datafication, algorithms, and other technologies. In this shifting legal and regulatory space, one of the main challenges of the digital era is empirically grasping these transformations.

The Ethnography Lab for Law, Digital Governance, and Society will serve as a center of cutting edge empirical and interdisciplinary research into the way that digital technologies are transforming the spaces, subjects, and objects of regulation, as well as how these technologies are in turn transforming the forms and practice of law. Ethnography has long been a critical tool for understanding the opportunity, limits, and challenges of law during major social transformations– from property regimes to human rights and the rule of law. Although ethnographers have been deeply engaged in studying digital transformation , only recently have they begun turning explicitly to the regulatory and legal implications of digitalization. At the same time, digital legal studies is a fast growing field, but with limited engagement with ethnographic approaches to studying the prevailing queries. The Ethnography Lab will serve to consolidate research methodologies in this emerging field of socio-legal inquiry.