WG9.4 – The Implications of Information and Digital Technologies for Development
After COVID-19: Digital Development Approaches to Post-Pandemic Issues
Workshop Chair: Silvia Masiero
The COVID-19 pandemic has created a plethora of new needs, encompassing the domain of health infrastructures and those of emergency assistance, social protection and socio-economic development measures. Digital approaches have been largely leveraged in COVID-19 responses, creating solutions that cover all such domains: COVID-19 tracking has been delegated to digital systems that have raised advocacy, but also concerns of privacy and data governance related to mobile-based apps (Taylor et al., 2020). In the post-pandemic world, digital technologies emerge as double-edged: capable of reinforcing injustices and inequalities (Dencik et al., 2022), but also to create approaches to foster socio-economic development by acting on drivers of injustice and strengthening solidarity and resistance.
Against this backdrop, this track invites papers that deal with digital approaches to issues emerging in and beyond post-pandemic scenario. We are especially interested in issues that pertain to the domain of socio-economic development, and their configurations in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic. We invite submissions on topics that include, but are not limited to:
- Digital health infrastructures in the aftermath of COVID-19
- Post-pandemic social protection systems in developing countries
- Datafied social policies in the Global South
- Algorithmic justice in relation to emergency assistance
- Digital social protection after COVID-19
- Digital inequalities and injustice in the post-pandemic global scenario
References:
Dencik, L., Hintz, A., Redden, J., & Treré, E. (2022). Data justice. London: Sage.
Taylor, L., Sharma, G., Martin, A., and Jameson, S. (2020). What does the COVID-19 response mean for data justice? In Taylor, L., Sharma, G., Martin, A., and Jameson, S. (Eds.), Data Justice and COVID-19: Global Perspectives, London: Meatspace Press, pp. 8-18.