Biography

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 notably 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.

During his Max Weber Fellowship, he aims 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 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.

Wessel has taught bachelor and master students at the Dublin City University, on the topics of applied ethics, ethics of technology, and the ethic and politics of digital money.