We have seven tracks in the Digital Pasts, Presents and Futures confrence with theoretical, empirical, and methodological contributions that engage with one or more of the following interconnected themes:

1. Digitalization and Cultural Identities: A Technosocial Perspective

This session examines how digitalization reshapes cultural identities understood as historically grounded and narratively constituted. We invite contributions exploring the interplay between digital technologies, technosocial imaginaries, and collective identities, with attention to minority identities, historical narratives, and transitions from analog to digital societies. The session foregrounds how imagined digital futures transform historical consciousness, identification, and self-identification across social and cultural contexts.

2. The Present and Future of Digital Families

Digital media are central to contemporary family life, reshaping care, relationships, learning, and connection. This session explores present and near-future dynamics of “digital families” amid platformisation. We invite contributions on diverse family forms, intergenerational practices, and those positioned outside dominant digital family norms. Papers may address current configurations and/or future imaginaries of digital family life using qualitative, quantitative, or mixed methods.

3. Decision-Making, Surveillance, and Counter-Practices in a Data-Saturated World

This panel examines how data-driven systems organize decision-making, surveillance, and governance across domains such as welfare, healthcare, education, and policing. We invite empirical and methodological contributions on datafied practices and counter-practices, including data activism, legal mobilization, and practices of care and repair. Particular attention is given to human and ecological consequences, and to connections between present struggles and longer histories of classification and control.

4. Studying Human–AI Conversations as Interaction: Methodological and Epistemological Challenges

As conversational AI becomes embedded in everyday life, research rarely treats human–AI exchanges as interaction. This session asks how such conversations can be studied turn by turn. Drawing on interaction analysis, ethnography, and STS, we explore agency, accountability, alignment, and resistance in human–AI interaction. We welcome contributions addressing methodological challenges and analytical strategies for studying interaction when one participant is computational.

5. Digital Transformations in Education

This thematic cluster examines how AI, platforms, algorithms, datafication, and surveillance reshape education across contexts and time. Situating current practices within digital pasts and contested futures, we invite contributions on policy, governance, pedagogy, teacher education, and learner experience. Sessions address educational ecologies in technology-rich environments and critically reflect on agency, responsibility, inequality, and the values embedded in educational technologies.

6. Imaginaries and Governance of Digital Transitions

This session explores digitalization as a set of imaginaries that frame desirable futures while silencing alternatives. We invite theoretical and empirical contributions examining how digital imaginaries shape governance across domains such as sustainability, education, healthcare, and labour markets. The focus is on how imagined digital futures enable, privilege, or constrain specific forms of governance and reproduce or challenge existing social and political cleavages.

7. Datafied Care and Ethical Futures

This session examines how datafied care reshapes relations of autonomy, vulnerability, and responsibility across care settings. We invite empirical and conceptual contributions on surveillance, digital intimacy, welfare platforms, and algorithmic repair. Key questions include whether data enhance autonomy or produce soft coercion, whose lives become visible or invisible through data, and how datafied care might be reimagined toward more just and human-centred futures.

Formats and approaches

We invite submissions of abstracts (up to 300 words) for presentation at the conferences paper-sessions. We welcome contributions that offer theoretical, methodological and/or empirical insights relevant to the conference themes in broad. Submissions may address conceptual frameworks, methodological advances, or empirical findings, and should clearly articulate their research questions, approach, and key contributions.

Deadline for submissions is the March 30, .2026

We look forward to receiving your abstracts and to an engaging exchange of ideas at the conference.

Edited volume

We are pleased to announce that an edited volume will be published based on conference.

The volume will bring together selected contributions from this international, interdisciplinary gathering. It will critically examine how digital technologies are embedded within and actively (re)shape social life—while also influencing imagined futures and shaping what is understood as possible, desirable, or inevitable.

Further details regarding the call for paper, including the submission deadline and publisher will be announced in due course.