A just state for everyone? Researching access to administrative justice in the digital era

Send us Fan Mail In this special episode we will hear about the new Research Line 'AI and New Technologies' introduced by the International Institute for the Sociology of Law (IISL) in 2026. The Institute was established in Oñati, Gipuzkoa, Spain in 1988 by the International Sociological Association’s Research Committee on the Sociology of Law and the Government of the Basque Country. &a...

Send us Fan Mail This is part II of collaborators' experiences: In this episode, you will learn about the experiences of interviewers and colleagues who actively contributed to the research process in the scope of this project. Colleagues from South Africa, Sint Maarten and Austria will share how they perceived the research process in their local contexts. They will talk about the moments the...

Send us Fan Mail In this and the next episode, you will have the chance to meet the people I collaborated with during field research and for data generation. In today's episode, we will hear about the experiences of three persons who contributed to the research in the scope of my field research in South Korea. Jiin, Anna and HyunSeung Joo explain what they liked about our collaboration and th...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode we explore a topic that has come up in all our case studies in the different world regions, even though in different forms, namely opposition and resistance to the state’s increasing use of digital tools and AI. From South Africa to Canada, from the Caribbean to South Korea – everywhere there are at parts of the population that do not necessarily agree with how the...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode I share insights from my field research in South Korea, one of the leading countries in the domain of digitalization and AI. I discuss the omnipresence of digitality, which refers to the condition of living in a digital culture, as I encountered it in public space and in interviews with people working in the public sector. The interview partners highlight that ther...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode we explore current challenges with regard to accessing public services in the digital age in South Africa, in particular in the rural areas. Accounts from different perspectives - citizen, government official and public ombuds staff - identify similar problems, such as lacking infrastructure, expensive data, trust issues, literacy and digital literacy. Despite nume...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode I share interviewees' accounts from my case studies in Canada, South Africa, Curacao and Sint Maarten on the issue of language, linguistic diversity and literacy when it comes to accessing public services and the justice system. People's experiences in these very different places demonstrate the universality of the problem, when public services and courts...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode we discuss some of the experiences people have when they try to get in contact with the public administration. Especially (semi-)automated telephone hotlines create frustration among citizens who want or need to talk to a public agent. Our interviewees from the case study in Quebec, Canada, report about long waiting times and the impossibility of reaching the right...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode I have the pleasure of introducing to you two sociologists who live and work in the Caribbean and whom I had the great pleasure to meet during my field research stay in the beginning of 2024. Elly Helings in Curaçao and Raymond Jessurun in Sint Maarten will share with us their perspectives on the digitalization of public services in these two islands, which are bot...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode I share with you some insights from my case studies in Canada, concretely in the Northwest Territories and Quebec. I focus on some of the challenges that Indigenous people are confronted with in the context of public service provision and access and more generally the complex relation of Indigenous peoples and the different orders of government.  See more on the pr...

Send us Fan Mail In this edpisode I’ll first talk a little about my current issues in methodology and data collection, and then discuss some preliminary findings from the first case study which was in Quebec, the French speaking province of Canada. I talked to staff of the public ombuds institution, to citizens as well as to NGO and government representatives to get an in-depth understanding of th...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode I will explain the research design and methodology for this project, which will build primarily on interviews and participatory observation. I will talk about case study selection, my comparative approach, the particularities of doing research in public bodies, and the challenges of gaining access to the research field; that is, first of all access to public ombuds...

Send us Fan Mail Welcome to the first episode of this podcast about my research project which started in February 2023. In this introductory episode I will explain my research interest and approach. The study focuses on the digital transformation of public services and two major interlinked challenges that come along with this development: the risk of social groups being excluded from these servic...