Defining Digital Welfare Through Collaboration

he Centre for Digital Welfare is a research centre that has operated at the IT University of Copenhagen since 2020. In this talk, I’ll describe how digital welfare is defined in a Nordic context, in comparison to contexts such as Australia and the UK, while acknowledging that ‘digital welfare’ itself is an emerging concept that is being defined as we meet, think and experience it. As a foreigner arriving in Denmark in early 2020, I will recount some of my own encounters with becoming part of the (digital) welfare state, something which is taken for granted by those born into the system. I will describe the different points of departure for thinking alongside digital welfare including sustainability, the consequences of agile culture, citizenship and, digital democratic spaces and how we include interlocutors such as public sector representatives, private sector consultancies and, third sector organisations mutually define and shape what digital welfare could look like in the future.
Finally, I will outline how we are working together to define digital welfare through an edited collection titled Digital States in Practice: intersections, implications and interventions which aims to take a citizen-centric examination of the consequences of public sector digital transformation.
The final part of this talk will involve open discussion about participants’ own experiences and encounters with the digital state as well as Q+A.