Call for abstracts: open panel at 4S 2025, ‘Evaluating the digital good?’
We are inviting submissions to our 2025 open panel at the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) Conference in Seattle, 3-7 September 2025.
This panel builds on our popular 2024 Amsterdam EASST/4S panel, Towards the ‘digital good’?. Last year’s panel was organised around contributions that: revealed the challenges and possibilities of cross-disciplinary thought about how digital technology might do social ‘good’; were interested in ‘what should be’ rather than ‘what shouldn’t be’; centred ideas of social equity, sustainability, resilience/wellbeing; that were open to future-focused enquiry into what ‘the good’ is, as well as how digital technology might be employed to move us closer toward it.
‘Evaluating the Digital Good?’ seeks to extrapolate out from this generative starting point. In short: if we can conceptualise contours of the ‘digital good’, then how are we to know that we have achieved it? Is there a means of ‘evaluating’ the digital good? These questions are asked whilst acknowledging (per a long lineage of STS) that evaluation is always also a pursuit of ascribing value in ways that are far from ‘neutral’, and that can valorise particular perspectives over others.
As part of the UK-based ESRC Digital Good Network, which comprises an interdisciplinary mix of scholars from across STS, psychology, computer science, design, and critical media, we seek interventions that seek to open up this question. We welcome experimental forms of knowledge expression, alongside more ‘traditional’ academic paper presentations, that:
- explore whether and how the digital good can or should be evaluated, assessed or measured;
- offer insights into the (novel) methodologies that might be put towards such work;
- interrogate how different epistemological starting points (eg qualitative, quantitative, creative, participatory, or otherwise) might render different results;
- explore these questions of evaluation across different technologies and contexts of technological deployment;
- consider the role of diverse communities, sectors and organisations and their likely heterogeneous renderings of the digital good.
Panel convenors:
- Ros Williams, University of Sheffield
- Kim Snooks, Lancaster University
- Claudine Tinsman, University of Sheffield
- Rhianne Jones, BBC R&D
Find out more about the conference and open panels. Please contact Ros Williams, r.g.williams@sheffield.ac.uk, if you have any questions about the call.
Submit an abstract. Deadline 31 January 2025.