5th ISA Forum of Sociology (6-11 July 2025)

Digitization and digital practices have a profound impact on the ways we live our everyday lives. We use smart phones and computers for entertainment, shopping and work, as well as distant parenting. Wi-fi connection points represent large structural and institutional transformations, that also changes the way we do families and close relations. Although we still both marvel and feel uneasy over leaps in the development in digital possibilities, most digital tools have become inevitable and unassuming parts of our everyday lives. Digitalization changes the precondition to do family life and accelerate the questions of what consequences these changes have on families, in families and for society.

This paper session welcomes empirical, theoretical or methodological studies on digitally fueled transformations of the family, that:

• look at digital family practices, including among migrants, transnational families and refugees, on school and work platforms, in digital personal communication, relations of care, parenting, digital intimacy and play.
• focus on how digital practices reproduce or challenge traditional family norms, gender norms and norms for parenting, and the display of such norms
• address all digitally fueled transformations of the family, and how these transformations impact and challenge family both as a concept, a social practice and as an institution in different societies around the world
• apply and develop the theoretical knowledge of family as a practice, addressing new forms of family sovereignty as well as vulnerabilities in and for the family due to digitalization in everyday lives.