Doing Digital Families: Exploring the Intersection of Digitalization and Family Life

The increasing digitalization of everyday life is reshaping the family in profound ways. Historically, the Industrial Revolution marked a shift from families as units of production to spaces of care and intimacy. Today, however, with the rise of digital technologies, families are evolving into hybrids of production, care and intimacy, due to digitalization and a growing increase of social functions performed digitally, from the home or from a distance. These changes have significant implications for family practices on individual, structural, and institutional levels.

In this paper, we explore the digitally driven transformations of families and how these shifts challenge traditional understandings of the family, both as a concept and as a lived socio-cultural practice. By reviewing studies from the last 15 years, we examine how digital technologies are shaping family dynamics and ask how these studies are extending our theoretical knowledge of family as practice, addressing new forms of family sovereignty as well as vulnerabilities in and for the family.

While digitalization is often viewed as a global phenomenon, its effects are not experienced uniformly. Social changes brought about by digital technologies are gendered, can vary across socio-cultural and geographical contexts, and manifest themselves differently in contexts of migration and (im)mobility, for example. Therefore, this paper proposes a comparative framework that aims to enhance our theoretical knowledge of how digitalization is transforming the family in diverse settings.

Finally, this paper serves as a foundation for a future anthology, inviting contributions from scholars presenting at the ISA Conference 2023 and ISA Forum 2025, to further explore the complex and evolving relationship between digitalization and family life.