Digital Family Practices

The COVID-19 pandemic gave digitization of both work, education and family life an unprecedented boost, and we have experienced large structural and institutional transformations of family practices, almost overnight. Home offices, family dinners on zoom and home schooling has become familiar elements of everyday life for whole populations, not just the few. These adaptions to this new social reality change 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 offers an opportunity to present studies on digital literacy, digital parenting as well as the ethical, legal, social and moral norms governing digital family practices. We welcome papers that frame the family theoretically as a "practice" , addressing new forms of family sovereignty as well as vulnerabilities in and for the family due to digitalization in everyday lives. Digital school and work platforms, digital personal communication and care, digital intimacy and play are all becoming part of everyday family life and we welcome studies on all these 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.