Send message to Author

Short abstract:

This paper explores the roles regulatory discourses allocate to infrastructures and data in the organisation of digital welfare. Drawing on a data feminist analysis, I discuss what power relations between human and more-than-human actors within the public sector these discourses hence configure.

Long abstract:

With the ongoing datafication and automation of welfare services provision, digital data are used for governance, public decision-making, (non-)citizens’ profiling and scoring for e.g. fraud prediction or calculation of welfare benefits. In regulatory discourses (e.g. strategy papers) datafication and automation of public welfare are, hence, promise ‘solutions’ to certain problems. This contribution joins scholarship critically interrogating such promises by exploring discourses around datafication and (potential) automation of the public sector, particularly in Germany, more closely.

I ask, what roles regulatory discourses allocate to infrastructures and data in the organisation of digital welfare. Drawing on a data feminist approach (D’Ignazio & Klein 2020) and research on imaginaries and metaphors (Mager & Katzenbach, 2021), I discuss what power relations between human and more-than-human actors within the public sector these discourses hence configure. This analytical lens helps interrogate public welfare actors’ discourses in regard to their values, whose work would be required to fulfil the promises of datafication or (potential) automation of welfare, and who are the expected beneficiaries. Empirically, the paper is based on a discourse analysis of publicly available documentation regulating the datafication and automation of German public sector (strategic papers, legal acts, policy documents). By attending to these discourses and speculating about subsequent changing relations between the state and its citizens through the feminist analysis of data power, this contribution discusses the extent to which datafication and automation could contribute to more just and equitable futures and what (other) relations are required to achieve these.