Spring is upon us, and so we shift our gaze towards some exciting times ahead. 

We are thrilled to announce our newest member, PROSA, who is one of the leading interest groups and labor associations for IT Professionals in Denmark, with 16,000 members working in or studying IT. Welcome aboard the Center for Digital Welfare (CDW).

We would also like thank Professor Karen Yeung from Birmingham Law School for her illuminating talk on live facial recognition technology and AI governance, which took place on the March 28. Next up in our Distinguished Speakers Series is Professor Noortje Marres who will be presenting her research about artificial intelligence controversies on April 27 at 10:30 – 12:00am in AUD 3 at the IT University of Copenhagen (ITU). The talk will be followed by a panel discussion. 

Under the theme Green Computing, the working group Sustainable Digitalization held a workshop in March on how to build computers in climate friendly ways. The workshop gathered research members from across digital design, social sciences and computer science, for presentations and collective reflection on some of the environmental challenges, which indeed require interdisciplinary collaboration to solve. Many eye-opening points were raised, giving way for future collaboration in the group, which now includes GATE21 and the Alexandra Institute as members.

Below you can read about recent and upcoming events, learn more about CDW’s international conference Welfare after Digitalization, and familiarize yourself with how architecture may help the recovery of psychiatric patients.

We hope you enjoy reading. 

Sincerely,
Brit, Laura and Rasmus

The CDW and ITU are very excited to announce the international conference Welfare After Digitalization: Digitalizing Welfare, Outsourcing Responsibility. The purpose of the conference is to better understand what welfare has become after the digitalization of four key sectors: education, energy, health care, and law enforcement. The conference is unique in that we strive for dialogue and joint presentations to share knowledge across practices and worlds that are often separate. 

The conference takes place at ITU November 28-29, 2022, and it is free to attend. If you would want to participate with your own research the application deadline is August 1. 
There will be two keynote speakers: Mareile Kaufmann, Associate Professor at University of Oslo, whose talk is titled: Making data matter. When data, tools and humans meet in the name of law enforcement, and Kean Birch, Associate at York University, Canada, whose talk is titled The Strange Futures of Digital Assetization?

The conference is the culmination of the ongoing Welfare after Digitalization research project. The project investigates how institutional values, digital affordances, and organizational politics are imagined and embedded in digital welfare services, as well as experienced and practiced by citizens, public servants, and developers of digital infrastructures across the public sector in Denmark. The project runs from 2020-23 and is funded by the Velux Foundations.

Read more about the conference, application process and sign up for the event here.

Recently, Assistant Professor Thorben Simonsen, the leader of CDW’s working group Digital Democratic Spaces published an article together with Cameron Duff and Jodi Struge (2022) on healing architecture.

The notion of healing architecture has recently emerged in discussions of the spatial organization of healthcare settings, particularly in the Nordic countries. While developments in Denmark are at the forefront of such innovations, there is no common or operative definition of healing architecture in the existing research literature, and there is very limited knowledge of how healing architectures shape clinical and patient outcomes. Building on ethnographic research in a Danish context, Simonsen suggests that any therapeutic effects of healing architectures is more likely to be a function of practice rather than any simple material causation.

Furthermore, he argues that healing architectures might have at least as great an impact on the character and organization of work, as they do on patient experience, wellbeing, and recovery. He suggests that more research is needed on how healing architectures make a difference in everyday clinical practices. This is to inform the development of evidence-based designs in the future, but also to further elaborate criteria for guiding post-occupancy evaluations of purpose-built sites, and to better understand the impact and implications for the organization of work and treatment. If you want to read more, the article can be retrieved here. 

Fritsch, J. & Witzke, A.S (2021). Environ/mental ecologies in new media art. In Hannah Star Rogers, Megan K. Halpern, Dehlia Hannah, Kathryn de Ridder-Vignone (eds.) (2021). Routledge Handbook of Art, Science, and Technology Studies. Routledge. 

Bruun, M.H., Wahlberg, A., Douglas-Jones, R., Hasse, C., Hoeyer, K.L., Kristensen, D.B., & Winthereik, B.R. (eds.) (2022). The Palgrave Handbook of the Anthropology of Technology. Palgrave Macmillan. 

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 co-editor Rasmus Egebjerg at raer@itu.dk.

Rasmus Egebjerg | Thorben Simonsen | Barbara Nino Carreras | Brit Ross Winthereik | Laura Juncker