The conference will be focused on digitalisation, which affects all spheres of the (post) pandemic social life. How are digital technologies affecting the world of work today? How does digitalisation affect the existing and new institutions of our social life? How do social actors use digital tools and platforms to create their own adaptation and resistance strategies? How do digital platforms and digital tools legitimize social, political and economic inequalities and ideologies in the sphere of work and mobility? How does digitalisation influence the emergence of social institutions?
The obvious context for answering these questions in 2022 is the COVID-19 pandemic and the (post) pandemic socio-economic crisis. There are many indications that the pandemic has accelerated the digitalisation trend in the sphere of work, leading to further expansion of remote work, the platform economy and other forms of organizational and technical innovation.
The pandemic has also exposed new areas of social inequality. We are particularly interested in digital inequalities, which are, on the one hand, a derivative of access to digital technologies, computers and the Internet, and on the other hand, may result from differences in motivation, competence or the level of use.
We are interested in papers addressing the topics of social inequalities and the new meanings of work in the digital age in an international and comparative context, combining it with dimensions of social differentiation such as origin, gender, class position, disability and others. We want to capture the multiplicity of transnational dependencies and similarities in the processes related to (post-) pandemic changes in the world of work in the context of digitalisation.

Vassil Kirov (Bulgarian Beyond4.0 team leader) will be a keynote speaker at the conference.

More information here.