Are you a researcher with ideas about how to improve our digital worlds, now and in the future? If so, please join us at What does a good digital society look like?, a two-day conference in Sheffield, UK, on 10th and 11th June 2027. 

 

We invite proposals for papers, panels and workshops from researchers from any discipline and stakeholders from any sector who are interested in coming together to talk about the digital society in which we want to live. We welcome different types of presentations, including theoretical, empirical, and methodological research papers, works-in-progress, practice-based work, and other kinds of contributions.

 

Possible topics include (but are not limited to):

• Ways to improve specific aspects of our digital worlds
• Equity, fairness and overcoming biases in a better digital society
• Environmental sustainability in a better digital society 
• Collective wellbeing in a good digital society
• Digital technologies  and societal/psychological resilience 
• Theories, concepts and methods for imagining a better digital future
• Radical, anti-colonial, global majority and indigenous visions of a good digital society
• Politics and the digital good, including digital goodness washing 
• The perspectives of specific groups and communities on the digital good
• Values for a good digital society
• Evaluating the digital good
• Human-centred design as empowerment
• Methods for building more equitable technologies, eg that function well in low-resource languages and in diverse cultures and contexts. 

Keynote speaker

We are delighted to announce that Professor Ruha Benjamin, transdisciplinary scholar, writer, educator, and cultural worker, and Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University, will give the keynote address at the conference. Her work is a major source of inspiration for our own, especially her (2019) invitation to "Remember to imagine and craft the worlds you cannot live without, just as you dismantle the ones you cannot live within". She is also Founding Director of the Ida B. Wells JUST Data Lab, and author of four books, Imagination: A Manifesto (2024),Viral Justice (2022), Race After Technology (2019), and People’s Science (2013), and editor of Captivating Technology (2019).

 

Plenary speakers will include

Jean Burgess, Distinguished Professor of Digital Media, Queensland University of Technology & Associate Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making & Society

Susan Halford, Professor of Sociology, University of Bristol and Director of the ESRC Centre for Sociodigital Futures

Rachel Coldicutt OBE, Founder and Executive Director of Careful Industries

Shakuntala Banaji, Professor of Media, Culture and Social Change at The London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE)

Jonathan Corpus Ong, Associate Professor of Global Digital Media at UMass Amherst

Sanjay Sharma, Associate Professor at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies, University of Warwick

 

Details

Webpage: https://digitalgood.net/conference-2027/

When: Thursday 10 and Friday 11 June 2027

Where: Sheffield Hallam University, UK

Participation fee: £150 full fee / £100 for PhD students or those without institutional support. The fee covers conference attendance, refreshments and lunches during the event and an evening reception on the first day. Travel, accommodation and evening meals are not covered.

This is an ICA post-conference event.