Social media for democracy – understanding the causal mechanisms of digital citizenship (SoMe4Dem) Current diagnoses that democracy is in crisis at the beginning of the 21st century share a common argumentative reference point: the (implicit) reference to the dysfunctional constitution of the political public sphere which is currently undergoing structural change. The rise of social media platforms is considered as one of its main constituents. While social media make the public arena more open and thus more responsive, these platforms also lead to new mechanisms of fragmentation and exclusion, an erosion of norms in public debate and a loss of trust in traditional institutions. The project will reconsider the diagnoses of this crisis by (1) providing better empirical evidence for the impact of social media on society with respect to political debates, (2) understanding the main causal mechanisms of this impact and (3) developing tools that improve the capacity of social media to contribute to the functioning of the public arena in a liberal democracy, i.e., deliberation, legitimation and the self-perception of the democratic subject.

This research project is an investigation of identity- and nation-building in eighteenth-century Bhutan with a particular focus on the agency of Buddhist masters as important diplomats and Bhutan's entangled history with Tibet. This will enable a novel understanding of Bhutan's religious and political history, particularly its Buddhism-induced development model of Gross National Happiness (GNH) that has not yet received systematic historical analysis in religious studies in Europe despite its global popularity as an example of alternative sustainable economic models. Furthermore, for the first time, Bhutan's historical role in linking South Asia, the British Raj, and East Asia will be systematically addressed. The research output will significantly advance both fields - that of Tibetology and religious studies. The innovative research design combines historical-philological methods by analyzing a thus far untranslated corpus of Bhutanese/Tibetan primary sources with a theoretical framework from religious studies focusing on identity and social differentiation. Therefore, the project is in its methodology, output, and impact inter-disciplinary. The researcher will produce a draft for a single monograph publication for habilitation in Germany. The proposed project involves as the researcher a German Tibetologist trained in Germany, Canada, India, and Bhutan reintegrating to Germany to work with a religious/Buddhist studies scholar at Leipzig University. This will enable substantial training for the researcher in religious studies and impactful two-way knowledge exchange between the researcher and the host institution due to the international experience of the researcher. An intersectional secondment at The British Library Endangered Archives Programme (London) will provide further Tibetological training in (digital) archival work, palaeography, and codicology, and produce globally accessible research data about this digitized Bhutanese/Tibetan primary source corpus.