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Welfare After Digitalisation: Siting values, affordances, and politics

Fri, August 21, 12:00 to 1:40pm CEST (12:00 to 1:40pm CEST), virPrague, VR 18

Abstract

In European welfare states, private companies are playing a still more significant role in shaping the institutions that deliver welfare. Research is therefore needed to explore possible transformations of welfare state values like social and cultural rights, equal access to services, diversity, transparency and accountability in the relation between citizens and the state. A report from the United Nations General Assembly (2019) identifies welfare state digitalization as one of the biggest threats to key principles of the democratic welfare state. The report focuses on the risks to equal rights, social security, and public sector transparency that are put in motion by the use of artificial intelligence and big data analysis. The report argues that while the notion of ‘digital transformation’ often has a neutral to positive ring to it, in practice it is very often characterized by attempts put in motion by the state to identify, profile, predict and target citizens or citizen groups whose dependence on public sector services is costly and therefore considered problematic. The report makes clear that many states are already ‘post-digital’ through a shift from an opt-in model to a ‘digital only’ situation. This panel suggests a Science and Technology Studies approach to public sector digitalization. The presentations seek to understand how welfare is sited and what it might be after digitalization. The papers each raises questions about how institutional values, digital affordances, and organizational politics are imagined and embedded in digitalized welfare societies, e.g. how they are experienced and practiced by citizens, public servants and developers of digital infrastructures. The papers focus on different welfare areas: Law enforcement, primary education, healthcare, and local government services. The overall question is how an intensified use of data and digital technologies reconfigure forms of citizenship, statehood and welfare values in both continuous and discontinuous ways.

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