CALL FOR PAPERS: SPECIAL ISSUE OF STS ENCOUNTERS “DIGITIZATION AND DATAFICATION IN AND OF SOCIAL WORK”

SPECIAL ISSUE OF STS ENCOUNTERS “DIGITIZATION AND DATAFICATION IN AND OF SOCIAL WORK”

Digital technologies, data, algorithms and AI are increasingly transforming society, and we experience that these technologies are promoted as necessary and inevitable instruments of modernization. At the same time, these technologies increasingly produce new types of problems and disasters that need to be mitigated. 

This special issue invites papers that explore the transformation of social work and social welfare in relation to digital technology. While digital systems have been integral to social welfare and social work for decades, primarily as tools for documenting and recording citizens’ cases, their scope has significantly expanded. Today, these systems are vital infrastructures for public welfare institutions. They are used not only for documentation but also for collaboration and communication between different professionals and citizens. Additionally, digital systems play a pivotal role in managerial surveillance, enabling the monitoring of social work processes, case progress, and the datafication and quantification of citizens. For the last couple of years, imaginaries about how big data, AI, algorithms, and machine learning can be used to predict vulnerability – for instance, to detect children at risk of abuse – have also flourished. While these developments offer novel opportunities, they also raise a plethora of concerns regarding ethics and surveillance, as well as “technical” questions about the standardization of data, data pooling, and the combination of data. Furthermore, these innovations risk imposing significant organizational and administrative burdens, particularly within welfare systems faced with cutbacks and increasing demands for cost-effectiveness. All this occurs in the face of the troubling fact that removing a child from their home and placing them in foster care or an institution is likely to produce vulnerability of a different sort than relieve the child from vulnerability.                        

The digital technologies in social work practice thus raise questions about how citizens are being datafied and managed by means of digital technologies, and how citizens are included and able to contribute to and negotiate their digital representations within these systems. It also raises questions regarding how social work as a profession is being transformed when social workers may be working more with the digital representation – the digital double – rather than with the “actual citizen”. However, we may also acknowledge that digital systems play a key role in the formation, coordination, and execution of social work that benefits the citizen. As evident in the field of STS, technologies and the work practices they configure are tools for producing knowledge and plans intended to help vulnerable citizens. They are central in producing care in a specific way.            

There is a long tradition in STS of studying technologies and their social implications for people, society and organizations. Drawing on actor-network and cyborg theory, the very meaning of concepts such as society, social, human, machine, and technical is not fixed, but changes through processes of material semiosis. With the increasing digitization of society, society itself changes, as the ways in which it is grasped are influenced by how it is digitally processed, monitored, and managed. Problems that were hitherto unimaginable can now be imagined through digital technologies and datafication. What was once uncountable may now be counted – or be thought of as countable. The digital enacts the world differently and expands what can be imagined as manageable by digital means – but at what expense?       

The digital thus changes what it means to be a vulnerable citizen, to do and manage social work, to care for and help vulnerable citizens, to include the citizen in social work… and to be a welfare society.   

We welcome contributions that may include, but are not limited to, the following:
– Theoretical and conceptual contributions connecting social work, STS, and digital technology 
– Empirical studies examining social work and digital technologies 
– Contributions addressing collaboration between social workers and citizens in executing and organizing social work and/or developing digital technologies for social work 
– Studies tracing actors/objects in shaping the vulnerable citizen and/or the practice of social work           
– Contributions exploring the digital double and the interconnected configuration of the digital and actual citizen                
– Contributions focused on the use of AI, machine learning, predictive systems, etc., in social work and social welfare systems

SPECIAL ISSUE EDITORS:

Mikkel Rask Pedersen, Patrick Heiberg Kapsch, Peter Lauritsen & Peter Danholt         

Submission Instructions

Research articles should be 6,000–8,000 words, excluding references and must include an abstract (200–300 words) and 3–6 keywords.

All submitted manuscripts will undergo double-blind peer review according to STS Encounters’ editorial policy.                

Articles may be submitted in English (UK/US). All articles must include an English abstract.

Tentative timeline for special issue:

October 1. 2025: Submission of extended abstracts (500-800 words)

October 15. 2025: Notification of acceptance

February 15. 2026: Submission of full articles

April 15. 2026: Article reviews to authors

June 15. 2026: Revised articles submitted

September 1. 2026: Final reviews to authors

November 1. 2026: Revised articles submission

December 1. 2026: Publication of issue