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Short abstract

This presentation examines how interoperable welfare data systems create and recreate citizens as vulnerable subjects. Drawing on ethnographic research, it analyzes the assumptions of infrastructures and how practitioners negotiate epistemic limits in assembling data from multiple domains.

Long abstract

Over the past decade, public organizations have increasingly adopted cross-organizational data sharing to produce new forms of knowledge and governance through interoperable systems. In Sweden, for example, over 95 percent of municipal social services use the interoperability infrastructure SSBTEK/GIF to aggregate data from nearly 20 organizations when assessing welfare applications (SKR, 2019; 2025).

However, interoperability is not a neutral technical achievement but an epistemic and governmental practice that reshapes how subjects and needs become intelligible (Isin & Ruppert, 2020; Koopman, 2019). Data in public organizations is produced within situated institutional practices and classificatory regimes, yet these contexts are often subordinated to standardization and infrastructural integration (Wagenknecht et al., 2024). When data is detached from its contexts of production and translated across domains (Lee & Ribes, 2025; Ribes et al., 2019), interoperability does not simply reveal a subject’s state; it enacts it.

In welfare systems, one such enactment is vulnerability; the conditions in which a subject is deemed in need of government support. Through classificatory infrastructures, "the needy" are reconstituted as administratively legible subjects whose needs, risks, and deservingness are inferred from fragmented data. Some forms of vulnerability are stabilized and made governable, while others become illegible or erased. Interoperability thus functions as a technology of subjectification and epistemic governance, defining what counts as vulnerability and what interventions become possible.

Drawing on ethnographic research across Swedish welfare organizations, this presentation examines the ontological underpinnings of welfare data interoperability, how practitioners negotiate its epistemic limits, and how vulnerable subjects are ultimately assembled.