Editor’s introduction to Special Issue: Vulnerable People’s Digital Inclusion in a Perplexed Milieu of Intersectional Vulnerabilities.

This special issue constitutes a timely and diverse collection of papers that present original insights into the digital inclusion of those who experience socio-demographic, economic, geographic, political or other vulnerabilities. This special issue aims to make a distinct contribution to the exploration of the nature and role of digital inclusion in the lives of vulnerable groups or communities while also considering the context of the COVID-19 pandemic and today’s heightened necessities for and dependencies on digital inclusion.

Over the last three decades, research has increasingly been conducted to understand the existence of multiple and complex digital inequalities that vary in breadth and depth and involve evolving nuances, assigning a multi-faceted nature to digital inclusion and flagging up a complex terrain of hurdles to overcome (Blank and Groselj, 2014; Borg and Smith, 2018; Katz and Gonzalez, 2016; Mubarak, 2015; Tsatsou, 2011, 2012; van Deursen and van Dijk, 2014). Research has also been used to acknowledge that barriers to digital inclusion are connected with social exclusion, associated social capital and social stratification trends (Clayton and McDonald, 2013) and that those who are vulnerable and at high risk of social exclusion are also those in greatest need of digital inclusion (e.g. Acharya, 2016; Alam and Imran, 2015; Chadwick et al., 2013; Fisher et al., 2014; Helsper and Eynon, 2010; Menger et al., 2016; Seale et al., 2015; Tsatsou et al., 2017).

Vulnerability, namely the ‘susceptibility to physical or emotional injury or attack’ (Ståsett, 2007: 51), is not a new concept. While we should acknowledge that all humans and populations are potentially subject to conditions of vulnerability, there are some groups that persistently face conditions of vulnerability, such as ethnic minorities, refugees, elderly, people with disabilities, homeless people, one-parent households, unemployed people, Gypsy-travellers and others. Different conditions of vulnerability are intersectional, and the literature argues about the existence of complex systems of multiple oppressions and privileges (Remedios and Snyder, 2018) and intersectional needs (Bunn, 2019). In examining the digital inclusion of socially marginalised, vulnerable populations, such as working-class mothers from ethnic minority communities in the United Kingdom, Kennedy (2005: 483) argued about ‘digital diversity’ by opposing imposed labels, technological expectations and prioritised community notions. Also, studying intersectionality as multiple layers of categorisation that ‘coexist and co-construct identity’ (Leurs and Ponzanesi, 2007: 633) in relation to the case of digital migrant youths, Leurs and Ponzanesi (2007: 640) found that ‘digital migrant youths’ identities emerge online as multi-layered individual paths navigating through and across the affordances and restrictions of digital media spaces’. Furthermore, a forthcoming edited collection (Tsatsou, forthcoming) demonstrates that unpacking the relationship between the digital and social inclusion of vulnerable people requires one to explore patterns and dimensions of intersectionality in the broader societal domain and their migration into the digital realm. In particular, in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, it has been argued that new kinds of unequally distributed risk emerged with the COVID-19 virus, deepening key axes of social differentiation and vulnerability, as COVID-19 exposure risk profiles (CERPs) hinge on pre-existing forms of social differentiation, such as socioeconomic status and digital (dis)advantage. Thus, it has been argued that individuals who can more effectively digitise key parts of their lives enjoy better CERPs than individuals who cannot (Robinson et al., 2020).

This special issue adopts the argument of technology research that digital systems are strongly sociotechnical and culturally situated, sitting at the intersection of social, digital and data exclusion while often reproducing, strengthening or – contrastingly – resisting pre-existing power relationships and the associated social inequalities (Park and Humphry, 2019; Tsatsou, 2014, forthcoming). This special issue responds to the problematisation around the ‘relative dearth of research on intersectionality and technology’ (Noble and Tynes, 2016: 6). In this sense, it is placed in the context of foundational accounts of intersectionality that invite the exploration of the complex dynamics of identities and power systems and the nature and drivers of intersectional inequalities (May, 2015; Smith, 2016). This special issue also responds to the plea for advancing currently limited and sporadic evidence on intersectionality and patterns of intersectionality in the digital realm. It aims to shed more light on the recent argument that distinct categories of vulnerability and associated inequalities result in a series of intracategorical discrepancies in both the digital and non-digital domains (Tsatsou, 2021).