I am very happy to be teaching the PhD seminar Digitalization, AI and Welfare: An STS Perspective on Social Work at the University of Neuchâtel this coming semester.

The seminar is part of the doctoral teaching context in Current Issues in Social Work and is open to PhD researchers from the ITTS (Institut transdisciplinaire de travail social) and other doctoral programmes in the social sciences and related fields.

September 17–18 and November 5–6, 2026
University of Neuchâtel

Digital technologies increasingly shape welfare institutions and social work practice. Algorithmic decision systems, digital infrastructures, AI-based documentation tools, and automated eligibility systems are changing how social services are organized, delivered, and evaluated. But technologies do not simply enter existing institutions and practices. They also participate in reshaping them. This is where Science and Technology Studies (STS) comes in.

Over four seminar days, we will approach digital welfare technologies as socio-technical arrangements and ask how technologies, professional practices, institutional structures, bodies, knowledge, and relations of power, responsibility and care become entangled.

We will start with some STS foundations, from the politics of artifacts and co-production to infrastructures and then move into algorithmic governance and automated welfare systems, AI and social work, technologies of care, professional practice, inequality and questions of accountability.

Among the questions that will accompany us are:

How do digital welfare infrastructures embody assumptions about “normal” users, clients and life trajectories?

What happens to professional judgment and responsibility when algorithmic systems become part of welfare practice?

How are relations of care transformed when they are technologically mediated?

And, more broadly: If digital welfare infrastructures increasingly govern access to care, how should we rethink responsibility, accountability and justice?

I am particularly looking forward to discussing these questions with doctoral researchers and to bringing STS into dialogue with social work research, welfare studies and current debates around AI.

So, this is already a little preview of what is coming in September. I will soon also add the seminar, including further information and readings, to my Teaching page.