Dr. Wessel Reijers

Wessel Reijers received his PhD at the Dublin City University and did his research in the ADAPT Centre for digital content technologies, on the topic of methods for practising ethics in research and innovation processes. His research interests are on the one hand concerned with philosophical reflection and theory building, most notable concerning hermeneutical approaches to analyse and understand emerging technologies, and on the other hand branch out towards a variety of themes, such as blockchain technology and the digital commons.

In his research for the Global Citizenship project at the EUI and the WZB, he will aim to open up a new field of research, namely the philosophical study of "governance technology for global citizenship". The focus of this research will be to build a theoretical understanding of the role that emerging technologies play in the global governance of the institution of citizenship and to use this understanding to study concrete applications of "citizenship technologies", such as identity registers and blockchain-based cloud communities.