Short Abstract

Mobbing (schools, workplaces, education, online spaces) is not merely a behavioral or interpersonal issue but socio-technical in nature. How can spatial, organizational, technological, and cultural configurations be designed to reduce exclusion, foster dignity, and actively prevent harm?

Description

Mobbing — whether occurring in schools, workplaces, vocational education, online spaces, or in informal communities is not merely a behavioral or interpersonal issue — but socio-technical in nature: produced through material arrangements, institutional practices, tacit norms, infrastructures, interfaces, and power relations. This panel proposes to connect perspectives from STS, design research, education research, organizational studies, architecture, psychology, and sociology to examine mobbing-prevention as designable through socio-technical arrangements, institutional cultures, and material as well as digital infrastructures. Rather than treating bullying or harassment as individual deviance or interpersonal dysfunction, this panel asks: How can spatial, organizational, technological, and cultural configurations be designed to reduce exclusion, foster dignity, and actively prevent harm?

Design in this sense expands beyond objects toward systems, rituals, interfaces, architectures, and organizational grammars. Mobbing can unfold via spatial arrangements, digital platforms or organisational norms, processes and metrics. Preventing mobbing requires systemic, situated and participatory interventions that are sensitive to the interplay between social practices and material and technical conditions, transcending disciplinary boundaries. To meaningfully prevent mobbing, we include cyberbullying as a socio-technical extension of the same phenomenon. Digital visibility dynamics, moderation mechanisms and platform design play a critical role in shaping interactions and the persistence or escalation of harm and afford new forms of aggression, persistence, visibility, and amplification (Smith et al. 2013). Platform moderation policies, interface cues, algorithmic visibility, anonymity structures, and notification systems shape emotional and relational experiences — often invisibly. Drawing on STS analyses of digital infrastructures (Plantin et al. 2018; Seaver 2022), we ask: How can the architecture of digital platforms and hybrid online/offline learning and work environments be re-designed to foster accountability, care, and mutual protection?

Contributions challenging dominant narratives and proposing interdisciplinary pathways for intervention and prevention are especially welcome.

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