Society, Law and the Digital Turn: Governing Digitalization, AI, Automation, and Algorithmic Power across Borders (WG Digitalization, AI and Society)

This paper session invites research that examines how law and legal institutions are responding to the profound social transformations wrought by digitalisation, artificial intelligence, and automation. These technologies reshape welfare systems, judicial processes, labour markets, migration governance, and everyday life, and they raise urgent questions about accountability, oversight, rights, and the distribution of power — questions that demand inquiry from multiple angles.

Papers may address topics including but not limited to: algorithmic decision-making or AI-dependent decision-support in public administration; the impact of generative AI on the relation between citizens and administrations; platform labour and legal precarity; AI in criminal justice and risk assessment; data sovereignty and digital colonialism; the sociology of legal professionals in automated or AI-influenced environments; and grassroots or social movement responses to digital enclosure, as well as more generally citizens’ or users’ experiences of and with digitality in socio-legal contexts. Methodological pluralism is encouraged, from ethnographic approaches to comparative and socio-legal analysis. Contributions from the Global South are especially welcome, as dominant narratives in AI governance have been shaped disproportionately by Global North legal frameworks and corporate interests.

The session deals with questions such as: Whose values are encoded in automated decision-making systems? What are the implications of the private-public intersection of digital tools in administrative use? Who benefits from the data-extractive model-training of large language models and who doesn’t? How do different legal traditions respond to algorithmic opacity? What new forms of inequality and resistance emerge when digital infrastructures meet entrenched social hierarchies?