Workshop: Understanding and Re-Imagining the Digital Welfare State
This two-day workshop turns its attention to both the present and the future of digital welfare. We ask not only how digitalisation is reshaping welfare governance and experience, but also how it might be reconfigured to serve democratic values, social justice, and human flourishing. What would it take to design welfare technologies that empower rather than control, that foster solidarity instead of suspicion, and that open new spaces for participation and care?
Abstract deadline: 31 October 2025
When: 12-13 Feb, 2026
Where: OsloMet, Pilestredet 46, Room PA329, Oslo
For: Early career researchers including members and alumni of DIGIT research school.
Abstract submission: Send your abstract (300-400 words) by e-mail to Marijke Roosen and Lior Volinz
Costs: Attendance at the conference is free.
Travel grants: Limited travel grants are available for early career researchers who do not have access to institutional funding. For DIGIT members with an accepted paper, travel and accommodation expenses will be fully covered by DIGIT.
The workshop is only open for participants with an accepted abstract.
Photo: Skjalg Bøhmer Vold/OsloMet
Call for abstracts
We invite early career researchers to join us in Oslo. The abstract submission deadline is 31 October. Submit your abstract by email to Marijke Roosen and Lior Volinz. Notification of acceptance is 15 November.
About the workshop
Across Europe and beyond, welfare systems are increasingly governed through digital infrastructures: automated decision-making, predictive analytics, and large-scale data collection. These developments, often framed as efficiency gains or fraud prevention, have in practice intensified conditionality, expanded surveillance, and deepened the exclusion of society’s most vulnerable members. Scholars and advocates have cautioned against a “digital welfare dystopia” where rights, dignity, and equity are sacrificed in the name of modernization.
At the same time, to re-imagine better futures we must first understand the digital welfare state as it exists today: its technologies, its policies, its consequences for claimants and frontline workers.
This two-day workshop turns its attention to both the present and the future of digital welfare. We ask not only how digitalisation is reshaping welfare governance and experience, but also how it might be reconfigured to serve democratic values, social justice, and human flourishing. What would it take to design welfare technologies that empower rather than control, that foster solidarity instead of suspicion, and that open new spaces for participation and care?
We invite critical, creative, and speculative contributions that balance analysis with imagination. The aim is to create a space for interdisciplinary dialogue across social science, humanities, criminology, law, and design, bringing together those who study what is with those who imagine what could be.
Invited Plenary Speakers
We are delighted to welcome Professor Anne Kaun (Södertörn University), whose research spans media theory, algorithmic culture, automation, and civic participation, and Professor Morgan Currie (University of Edinburgh), whose work focuses on automated social services, data justice, and participatory mapping. Their contributions will anchor our conversations on both the lived realities and possible futures of the digital welfare state.
Guiding Questions
How is the digital welfare state currently being implemented across different contexts, and with what consequences for claimants, frontline workers, and institutions?
What forms of surveillance and monitoring are embedded in welfare technologies, and how do they shape experiences of inclusion, exclusion, and conditionality?
To what extent could welfare surveillance be repurposed to a tool of care rather than control?
How do digital welfare systems affect marginalized groups differently (e.g. migrants, people with disabilities, ethnic minorities, or low-income households)?
What conceptual tools can help us reimagine welfare beyond logics of efficiency, surveillance, and conditionality?
How might digital infrastructures be repurposed to strengthen equity, participation, and trust?
What role could design, activism, or policy innovation play in building more democratic digital welfare futures?
How can lived experiences of welfare claimants and frontline workers inspire both critique and alternative imaginaries?
What lessons can be drawn from national variations, grassroots practices, or experimental projects that challenge the dominant trajectory?
Responsible resarchers
Dr Marijke Roosen
Marijke Roosen is a DIGIT member and a MSCA postdoctoral researcher at OsloMet. Her research focuses on surveillance in the penal field, currently extending to welfare surveillance. She holds a PhD in criminology and she has previously worked in the fields of gender studies and law and technology. She has worked as a senior researcher at Demos Helsinki, where she contributed to an ethical framework for human-robot interaction. Marijke is an STS enthusiast and a board member of the Dutch Journal of Gender Studies.
Dr Lior Volinz
Lior Volinz is a researcher devoted to the study of surveillance and security technologies and practices, as well as urban conflicts, with a strong interest on their social and political implications. Lior is currently working as a researcher at Institute of Criminology at the Faculty of Law in Ljubljana, where he works on the MSCA-ERA postdoctoral fellowship project, SURVEILWEL – ‘Digital Seams in the Social Safety net’, which focuses on welfare surveillance and its social consequences. Lior holds a PhD from the University of Amsterdam (2019), where he defended his dissertation at the department of Human Geography, Urban Planning and International Development.
This workshop is with support from DIGIT research school, the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship; and the Institute of Criminology, Faculty of Law, University of Ljubljana.
Please feel free to contact the DIGIT coordinator should you have any practical questions.
For questions related to the workshop please contact Marijke Roosen or Lior Volinz