The Datafied Family - Event & Call for Papers
Professor Ranjana Das from the Department of Sociology is hosting an international event – on Wednesday 28th June 2023, with funding from the Institute of Advanced Studies.

From body-trackers, non-human digital support apps, smart home tech, parenting apps and gadgets, surveillance devices from the womb to the cradle, technologies of intimacy and play in the Internet of the Things, and wellbeing and wellness support bots – the textures of family life are changing – at disparate paces across global cultures and economies with a steady increase in family technologies, which are subtly, and not so subtly altering the doing of care, intimacy, leisure, learning, play, routine and more.
– a day-long, international, virtual workshop – interrogates these issues and will bring international voices at the cutting-edge of Sociology, Communications, Education, Data Science, and Health and Wellbeing – to meet the Âé¶¹ÊÓÆµâ€™s longstanding interests in digital societies, technology and society, family sociology and health, parenthood and childhood.
Keynote speakers at the event include , London School of Economics, UK; , University of Hyderabad, India; , Catholic University of Milan, Italy and , University of St Gallen, Switzerland
Professor Das said:
‘This event, particularly helped by its fully online and free-to-attend format, will bring together scholars across disciplines and career stages, looking at the interface between emerging technologies amidst datafication, and the family – including multiple generations, facet and relationships. A lot of fantastic work has been going on in the area, across the globe, and this event will be an excellent opportunity for the community of scholars working on datafication and families to come together.’
Event Website and Call for Papers
The event website can be found and the event welcomes paper submissions on its in the following areas – which are indicated below but not produced as an exhaustive list –
- Surveillance technologies in the home
- Body trackers
- Geo-location devices and relationships
- Datafication of intimacies and sexuality
- Parenthood, parenting and platforms
- Childhood, big data and datafication of childhood
- Rights based perspectives on data technologies in the family
- Kinship, routines, time and technology
- Aging, care and emerging technologies
- Smart home technologies
- Leisure, play, learning and Big Data
- Algorithmic cultures, resistance, play and algorithmic shaping of family life
- Data driven discrimination
- Data inequalities and injustices
- Redefining ‘family’ in an era of datafication
Abstract submission details:
Final Submission Deadline: 28th February 2023
Notification of Outcome: March 20th 2023
Event date: 28th June, 2023, 930 am to 3 pm UK time.
Submission portal: [* *].
If any questions, please get in touch with Professor Ranjana Das, at r.das@Surrey.ac.uk