Digital Humanism Opportunities: Fellowships, Summer Schools and Conferences

If you have heard of Digital Humanism at all, you have probably heard of one thing: the Digital Humanism Fellowship at the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM) in Vienna. It is the most visible opportunity in the field, and for a doctoral or early-postdoctoral researcher it is a genuinely good one.

It is also one door into a much larger building.

Since the Vienna Manifesto on Digital Humanism was published, the field has grown into an ecosystem with a UNESCO Chair, an annual research conference, summer schools on two continents, a free public lecture series, open-access books that have been downloaded more than a million times, and a fellowship program that has produced books rather than just residency reports. This guide maps the Digital Humanism opportunities that are actually open to researchers — including those based around the Mediterranean.

What Digital Humanism Is — and What It Is Not

Digital Humanism analyzes and seeks to influence the interplay between technology and humankind, so that technological development serves a better society and fully respects universal human rights. The Digital Humanism Initiative at TU Wien puts it simply: technology is for people, not the other way round.

Its 2027 conference call sets out two things the field rejects:

• “Digital animism” — attributing personhood, intentionality or moral capacity to digital systems. A model that convincingly simulates reasoning or empathy has not thereby acquired either.
• “Digital mechanism” — reducing human beings to computational systems. People are embodied, vulnerable and capable of moral reflection in ways that do not reduce to software processes.

One distinction causes more failed applications than any other:

They sound alike and they are not the same field. IWM explicitly excludes projects that simply use digital tools to do humanities research. If you are applying to a Digital Humanism call, your project has to be about the human, social, political, economic or geopolitical dimensions of digitalization itself.

Fellowships

IWM Digital Humanism Fellowship, Vienna

The flagship. Three consecutive months in residence at the IWM in Vienna, a monthly stipend of €2,750 for doctoral candidates and €3,300 for postdoctoral fellows, office space and no teaching load. Open to all academic disciplines, with no geographic restriction.

Status: closed. Applications closed on 21 September 2026, and applicants are due to hear by 30 November 2026. The initiative reports a record 497 applications for summer 2027, so prepare early for the next round.

We have written a full guide to eligibility, the application documents and what past fellows produced:

IWM ERC Mentoring Initiative

Less known, and useful at a different career stage. IWM, the Polish Academy of Sciences and the Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education run a mentoring workshop for researchers preparing ERC Starting and Consolidator Grant applications in the humanities and social sciences. Mentors are scholars who have sat on ERC evaluation panels or held ERC grants themselves, and the workshop works through the academic design of your project rather than the administrative mechanics.

The workshop is free, held remotely, and conducted in English. One caveat matters: it is aimed specifically at researchers in Central, Eastern and South-Eastern Europe — the one program in this guide with a hard geographic restriction. Details and deadlines are on the IWM open calls page.

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Related Fellowships

These programs do not carry the Digital Humanism name, but they fund work on the same questions: who controls technology, how it affects society, and how people can govern it. None of the organizer pages below states a nationality restriction, but confirm your eligibility with the organizer before you apply.

Mozilla Foundation Fellowship 2027–2028

Status: open. Letters of intent are due by 17 December 2026 at 23:59 Pacific time, and shortlisted applicants are invited to submit a full application by 12 March 2027.

Mozilla will award 10 twelve-month fellowships starting on 1 June 2027. Independent Fellows receive US$125,000 in total, and Embedded Fellows, who work with a host civil society organization, receive US$100,000. Focus areas include sovereign AI and public infrastructure, shared security and audit infrastructure for small organizations, and business models for a post-agentic web.

Two conditions matter. Projects must be primarily technical, except in the Creative Advocacy stream, so Mozilla’s FAQ rules out work grounded mainly in philosophical reflection or academic exchange. Fellows must also be able to receive funding from a US-based 501(c)(3) organization. See the call for applications and the FAQ.

HIIG Impact AI Fellowship 2027, Berlin

Status: paused, reopening briefly. The Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society has paused this call and will not keep it open until the original 15 January 2027 deadline. After two information calls, on 10 November at 10:00 CET and 17 November at 15:00 CET, it plans to reopen applications for what it says will most likely be a few days. Attend a call or watch the page if you plan to apply, because no reopening date has been announced.

Fellows assess the societal and environmental impacts of one real AI use case over ten weeks, from 16 August to 22 October 2027. The fixed stipend is €5,000. Two weeks are in person in Berlin and the middle weeks can be remote, with a mandatory online session on 11 May 2027. A master’s degree is generally required. Details are on the HIIG call page.

Weizenbaum Institute Affiliated Fellowship, Berlin

Status: no deadline listed. Fellows spend one to three months with a Weizenbaum Institute research group or unit. You first contact a research group to confirm that a guest stay is possible, and the groups select the fellows.

The monthly allowance is €3,000 for doctoral candidates, €4,000 for postdocs and €5,000 for professors, reduced if your income continues. A travel lump sum goes up to €1,200 for travel from outside Europe. Details are on the Weizenbaum fellowship page.

CAIS Fellowship, Bochum

Status: next deadline not confirmed. The most recent deadline listed by the Center for Advanced Internet Studies was 31 August 2026, so check the page for the next round.

Fellows spend three or six months in Bochum working on the societal impact of digital transformation, in academia or professional practice. Fellows with no regular income receive €2,000 a month, and CAIS provides a private office, a furnished apartment and one return trip. Applicants need at least a master’s degree and very good English, and fellows must be on site from Tuesday to Thursday. Details are on the CAIS fellowship page.

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Summer Schools

Summer schools are the most underrated entry point in this field. They are short, they are often subsidized, and they put early-career researchers in the same room as the people who write the field’s books.

ACM Europe Digital Humanism Summer School, Vienna

Run in Vienna with ACM Europe, and now in its fifth edition. The program deliberately runs in both directions: technical talks that explain the potential and limits of AI to participants without a computing background, and talks from philosophy and political science that put those technologies in social context. Topics have included digital politics and sovereignty, participation and democracy, and the philosophical and ethical implications of generative AI and large language models.

Status: 2027 edition not announced. The fifth edition took place in July 2026. Watch the summer school page for the next one.

African Digital Humanism PhD Summer School

The most interesting recent development in the field, and the most relevant one for researchers across North Africa. The first edition was held in Kigali, Rwanda; the second ran at Central University in Accra, Ghana, from 31 August to 5 September 2026, with an innovation bootcamp organized by Carnegie Mellon University Africa and the W4RA research program.

What makes it worth watching for the next edition:

• Who it is for — PhD students, postdocs and early-career staff from any discipline, with priority for participants based in Africa.
• Size — 50 to 70 participants, small enough that you actually talk to the lecturers.
• Money — a budget for fee waivers and financial support for qualified students and young researchers, applied for separately and well before the school itself.
• Themes — AI and society, digital ethics and governance, technology policy, AI and language inclusion, digital transformation in Africa, human-centered design, and democracy and law in the digital age.

For researchers in Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya and Egypt, this is a Digital Humanism program on your own continent with an explicit mandate to fund participants from it.

Status: next edition not announced.

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Conferences and Calls for Papers

Digital Humanism International Interdisciplinary Research Conference

The field’s own conference series. The first edition was held at the IWM in Vienna on 20–21 November 2025; its proceedings were published open access.

The second edition runs 10–12 March 2027 at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities (BAdW) in Munich. Its publication route is what makes it worth the effort: accepted contributions appear as an open-access volume in Springer’s Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) series, scheduled for July 2027.

Status: papers closed, registration opening soon. The organizers say registration will open in November 2026. Early registration costs €100 until 31 December 2026, then €130, with reduced rates for the bidt network, and there is no on-site registration. A limited number of fee waivers is available for selected speakers without institutional funding, participants from the Global South and students at Bavarian universities. Request one by emailing dighum2@bidt.digital. Full details are on the conference page.

Its cycle, which is worth knowing if you want to be ready for the third edition:

The call welcomes contributions from all disciplines, which in practice means a political scientist and a systems researcher are reviewed on the same programme.

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Free and Open: Lectures, Books and Community

Not every opportunity needs an application. If you are deciding whether this field is for you, or building the background reading for a proposal, start here — all of it is free.

Upcoming Free Online Talks

• 10 November 2026, 17:00–18:00 CET. Michael McNamara, Member of the European Parliament, on current developments regarding the Digital Omnibus, in the Polis Digitalis series.
• 24 November 2026, 17:00–18:00 CET. Sanne Vrijenhoek on news recommender systems that support democratic society, in the DigHum Lecture Series.

Lecture Series, Books and Founding Texts

• The DigHum Lecture Series. Roughly every two weeks, typically Tuesday afternoons at 17:00 CET, online. Sessions have covered the techno-colonization of academic knowledge production and the future of computer science in academia.
• Polis Digitalis. A newer event series on securing a democratic digital space, which has hosted figures including members of the European Parliament.
• The video archive. Lectures and panels are published on the initiative’s YouTube channel.
• Open-access books. Introduction to Digital Humanism passed one million downloads in March 2026. Digitalization and Us has been translated — the Italian edition was presented in Milan in May 2026.
• The Vienna Manifesto and the Roadmap. The manifesto is the field’s founding text and the single most useful thing to read before writing any Digital Humanism application; the Roadmap sets out research and innovation priorities.
• The UNESCO Chair on Digital Humanism at TU Wien, held by Peter Knees, which gives the field an institutional anchor inside the UN system.

The initiative also publishes public policy positions — an open letter on regulating digital technologies, a statement on the EU AI Act, a statement on ChatGPT — which are useful signals of where the field’s arguments are heading.

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Why This Matters for Mediterranean Researchers

The research questions this field funds are, in several cases, questions the Mediterranean region is already living through. Recent IWM Digital Humanism fellowship projects have covered the hidden bias of natural language processing in South Asian languages, digital surveillance and the human-rights costs of countering violent extremism in Kenya, AI-assisted judicial decision-making, and the EU in a weaponized digital world.

Swap the geography and those are Maghreb and Mashreq research agendas: Arabic and Amazigh language coverage in AI systems, surveillance and civic space, algorithmic decisions in public administration, and the digital dimension of EU–Mediterranean relations.

Two practical points follow. First, these calls do not exclude you — the IWM fellowship sets no nationality requirement, and recent cohorts have included fellows from Nairobi, Delhi, Guangzhou and Johannesburg alongside Western European and North American institutions. Second, the African summer school is the rare program that explicitly prioritizes and funds participants from the African continent, North Africa included.

How to Keep Track

Deadlines in this field move year to year, and a guide is only ever a snapshot. Three sources carry nearly every call:

1. The Digital Humanism Initiative news feed at TU Wien — lectures, summer schools, conferences and calls for papers.
2. The IWM open calls page — fellowships and mentoring programs, usually opening in the autumn for the following academic year.
3. The DigHum newsletter, which is the lowest-effort way to catch a call before the deadline rather than after it.

Always confirm a date on the organizer’s own page before you plan around it — including the dates in this guide.

Cover image: the main building of TU Wien, which hosts the Digital Humanism Initiative. Photo: P e z i, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Program details are drawn from the Digital Humanism Initiative and IWM websites.