Call for Papers:

Conference: What does a good digital society look like?
Organized by the ESRC Digital Good Network
June 10-11, 2027
Sheffield Hallam University, UK
https://digitalgood.net/conference-2027/

Deadline for submissions: October 29, 2026

Digital technologies should be good for people, societies and the planet, but there is ample evidence that they are often not. Social scientists, humanities scholars and others have provided rich empirical evidence of the harms and inequities that can result from digital tech deployments. For example, dating apps are used to harass and control as well as to enable romantic connections. Social media platforms deny users access to communities of wellbeing support in the process of moderating content to limit self-harm. Generative AI can provide creative assistance and make skills accessible, but it also hallucinates, infringes copyright and results in job losses. And there are environmental costs from data centres’ energy consumption and the global appetite for new devices.

The negative consequences of tech deployments make clear the digital society we do not want. The next step is to ask what a good digital society looks like, a question which is attracting growing interest around the globe. What does a good society look like?is a two-day conference which addresses this question. It takes place in Sheffield, UK, on 10-11 June 2027. The conference represents the culmination of the five-year long Digital Good Network, which is collectively concerned with the notion of the ‘digital good’: both what it means, and how we achieve it.

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

Jean Burgess, Distinguished Professor of Digital Media, Queensland University of Technology and Associate Director of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society

Rachel Coldicutt OBE, Founder and Executive Director of Careful Industries

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

DETAILS

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.

ABOUT THE CONFERENCE

The Digital Good Network and this conference are in dialogue with the growing vein of scholarship that challenges us to imagine more desirable (digital) futures, like Ruha Benjamin’s work, Payal Arora’s (2024) From Pessimism to Promise, and scholarship on hope such as Bregman’s (2020) Humankind: a hopeful history and Van Der Lugt’s Hopeful Pessimism (2025). These works, in one way or another, call on us to take imaginings of better futures seriously, as spaces where the future gets shaped. They urge us to move from the question ‘what digital society don’t we want?’ to ‘what kind of digital society do we want, and how do we get there?’

We invite proposals for papers, panels and workshops from researchers and stakeholders from any discipline or sector who are interested in coming together to think 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.

Of course, notions of a good digital society are contested. When asking what a good or better digital society looks like, we need to ask good for whom? and who gets to decide?. We need to ask whether, and in what conditions or power relations, it is possible to achieve the digital good, especially given that disadvantaged, marginalised and minoritised groups are often not included in conversations about these questions.

WE INVITE PROPOSALS THAT RESPOND TO THE FOLLOWING THEMES AND OTHER TOPICS:

• Equity, fairness and overcoming biases in a better digital society
• The place of environmental sustainability in a better digital society
• Collective, communal wellbeing as a digital good
• Societal and psychological resilience in relation to digital technologies
• Theories and concepts for understanding the digital good
• Radical, anti-colonial, global majority and indigenous visions of the digital good
• Politics and the digital good, including digital goodness washing
• The perspectives of specific groups and communities on the digital good
• Methods for researching the digital good
• Digital good values
• Evaluating the digital good
• Human-centred design as empowerment
• Methods for building more equitable technologies that, for example, function well in low-resource languages and in diverse cultures and contexts
• Co-opting the digital good / goodness-washing.

HOW TO APPLY

We invite:

• traditional conference paper submissions: with an abstract of 250 words;
• panel submissions: with a predefined set of confirmed speakers: 150 word abstracts for each paper plus an overarching, 250 word panel abstract;
• workshop submissions: with an abstract of 400 words, to include the theme, activities, and practical requirements;
• submissions for creative formats: with an abstract of 250 words and up to four accompanying images.

Please download the application form here and submit your proposal via email to [email protected] by 29 October 2026. Notifications of acceptance will be sent by mid December 2026.

FEE WAIVERS

To support diverse participation at this event, the Digital Good Network will offer up to five conference fee waivers to participants who have had papers accepted via the peer review process. These awards are designed to assist scholars and researchers who would otherwise face financial barriers to attending. To ensure that fee waivers go to those most in need, we kindly request that you make every effort to secure funding outside of this award if possible.

Applications for fee waivers will open after acceptances have been announced.

We will ask you to write up to 300 words in support of your application. You may, for example, explain the circumstances you are in, and how your contribution to the conference will bring a distinctive, underrepresented perspective.

TIMELINE

Launch: July 2026
Deadline: 29 October 2026
Notification of decisions: By mid-December 2026
Registrations open: Mid-December 2026
Registration closes: Friday 30 April 2027

ORGANISING COMMITTEE

Ros Williams, Gina Neff, Shaoying Zhang, Danielle Hope, Vimbai Chapungu, Arathy Sb.

For questions and more information, please contact [email protected].