It has been another great summer at the Center for Digital Welfare! Before we went on holidays, we spent the month of June hosting working group meetings and hosting an event at Folkemødet 2022 on Bornholm. The latter was a public event, where James Maguire, Casper Frohn and Brit Ross Winthereik had invited 4 prominent guests to play a round of Climate Jeopardy. With the help of long-standing Jeopardy host Lasse Rimmer, and the ITU communications department, the event attracted quite and audience. A big thank you to all parties involved, and especially to our guests, Lea Wermelin, Tommy Ahlers, Katherine Richardson and Ingrid Reumert for keeping the spirit high and playing fair.

Now, as the summer break is coming to an end the CDW researchers are settling back in: The fall semester will bring about regular meetings in our four working groups inviting members to share experience, research, and ideas about digital welfare. Also, we will go on expeditions to among others KHORA VR and Center for Digital Psychiatry, continue the Distinguished Speakers Series with external scholars, as well as hosting the final conference in the Welfare after Digitalization project. Put differently, the CDW has quite a semester coming up.

Regrettably, the summer break is not the only thing that has come to an end: As most of you already know, our Head of Center, professor Brit Ross Winthereik has accepted a position as professor at Roskilde University and will be leaving the IT University and the CDW by the end of August. This newsletter thus marks the beginning of Brit’s final month with us, and already on 19 August at 230pm ITU is hosting her farewell reception in the corridor of 3D. Everyone is welcome and we hope to see you there!

This sad news aside, in this newsletter you can also read about our recent and upcoming events, as well as learn more about postdoc Vasilis Vlassis’ work in the new research project DIGeMERGE.

We hope you enjoy reading.

Sincerely,
Brit and Kitt

On 27 June, at DRS2022 Giacomo Poderi, Joanna Saad-Sulonen and others organized and facilitated the full-day workshop called Commoning design and designing communing. | On 7 July, in York Thorben Simonsen gave a talk at the Department of Sociology, titled ‘The Spatial Organization of Care’. | Also on 7 July, at EASST Anne-Sofie Lattrup Sørensen was invited to speak for the Early Career Subplenary: Speculative Ecologies for a Vulnerable World and participate in the panel Infrastructured Timescapes of the Anthropocene and Climate Change with her paper: ‘Negotiations of goodness in Norway's oil capital - generational dynamics of living well in post-petroleum futures’. In July, Jessamy Perriam and Simy Kaur Gahoonia met with the Research for Educational Impact group at Deakin University in Australia to talk about the CDW research and center model.

The CDW has a stake in the new research project on Digital Emergency Communication (DIGeMERGE) led by research professor Åshild Kolås from Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO). The DIGeMERGE project is set to carry out research on the use of digital 3.0 (many-to-many) communication during public emergencies in Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Finland.

The digital communication tools under study include COVID-19 tracing apps and other smartphone applications that use location data, mass notifications via text message, and social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook. These tools are currently used as a part of everyday communication to the public, for cautionary public safety advice, and as a part of emergency response, ranging from search-and-rescue operations to COVID-19 contact tracing. Digital tools offer advantages in terms of scale, reach and speed, while also presenting new challenges to first responders, the general public and emergency planners.

Using a grounded, applied approach, the project will review the use of digital communication tools and platforms in the four countries (Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Finland), investigate longstanding debates about data  protection and privacy as well as emerging concerns in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, examining promises and pitfalls of new technology. Comparing the use of digital tools in the four  countries, we will investigate the scope and implications of the ‘appification’ and ‘platformization’ of emergency communication, and challenges of integrating user-generated content into emergency  management. 

If you are interested in learning more about the DIGeMERGE-project, please reach out to Vasilieos-Spyridon Vlassis at vavl@itu.dk

On 26 August, Anne-Sofie Lattrup Sørensen is attending the panel Transition Narratives at the Petrocultures Conference in Stavanger, Norway presenting the paper: ‘Generation carbon? CO₂ as generational identity among young Norwegians’ | Jessamy Perriam is currently on a visiting research fellowship at the Centre for Culture and Technology (CCAT) at Curtin University in Australia, among other things taking part in their disability theory reading group and learning more about how to contribute academic expertise to government policies.

Nielsen, Mette Lykke, Cæcilie Sloth Laursen, and Johnny Dyreborg. 2022. ‘Who Takes Care of Safety and Health among Young Workers? Responsibilization of OSH in the Platform Economy’. Safety Science 149 (May): 105674. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssci.2022.105674.
 
Tsaknaki, Vasiliki, Pedro Sanches, Tom Jenkins, Noura Howell, Laurens Boer, and Afroditi Bitzouni. 2022. Fabulating Biodata Futures for Living and Knowing Together. In Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS '22). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1878–1892. https://doi.org/10.1145/3532106.3533477
 
Højlund, Holger, and Thorben Simonsen. 2022. ’A shared zone of ignorance: considering practices of seeing and unseeing in and around nursing stations in two psychiatric wards’. ephemera (online first)

Dear readers, we are working on improving the accessibility of our newsletter. If you run into any issues while browsing our newsletter, or you have suggestions to make the newsletter more enjoyable, email our Kitt Plinia Nielsen at kitn@itu.dk

Kitt Plinia Nielsen | Vasilieos-Spyridon Vlassis | Brit Ross Winthereik