Edited Volume
Call for Abstracts:
Edited Volume on "Datafied Decision-Making"
Data and society share a dynamic, complex relationship: data shapes our world while our world continuously generates new data. The rise of AI and the planetary scale of computation have fundamentally transformed the process of datafication and our understanding of decision-making. Datafication converts decision-making into quantifiable data for computational processing. Computing technologies and datafication reconfigure the epistemological and physical-material infrastructures of decision-making, because it relies on algorithms and AI, rather than human decision-making. Though often perceived as neutral, datafied decision-making carries significant political implications. It affects knowledge systems and social norms, transforms environmental studies by challenging established views on nature and justice, reshapes power dynamics, and raises crucial legal questions about rights and accountability. These complex issues demand cross-disciplinary analysis.
In our edited volume on datafied decision-making, we invite critical reflection on socio-technical decision-making in data-worlds. The edited volume opens a discussion on the question of how datafication processes are reshaping decision-making and our world. We welcome perspectives from researchers from political science, law, sociology, environmental studies, science and technology studies, critical data studies and related fields, as those provide critical insights into how algorithms and data practices shape power, justice, and social outcomes, ensuring that ethical, legal, and societal implications are fully considered.
The environmental studies, contribute a critical, reflective lens to the study of datafied decision-making by interrogating how technological responses to environmental crises reshape our understanding of nature, agency, and knowledge. This includes, but is not limited to, the modelling of planetary and multidimensional systems to simulate future environmental scenarios, or smart city platforms that use data to manage urban sustainability. By framing ecosystems as systems that can be monitored, predicted, and optimized, they support forms of eco-governance based on managing risk and promoting resilience. These cases highlight the need for critical reflection on environmental sensing, data infrastructures and their impact on shaping environmental futures, knowledge and power structures.
In the legal discipline, data-driven decision-making and judicial analytics is promising efficiency but raising urgent questions about transparency, accountability, and the risk of reinforcing biases—especially regarding justice, autonomy, and discrimination. This invites the critical examinations of how algorithmic tools impact legal frameworks, policy-making, and fundamental rights, and seeks contributions that address the ethical, regulatory, and societal challenges in law.
For political philosophy, datafied decision-making raises concerns for two reasons: One the one hand, it is a profoundly political process in which the rationalities of political decision-making are changing away from discursive and towards computational methods. Although the collection of data has always been an important instrument of biopolitics, datafied decision-making challenges liberal democracy as it limits the possibility of unknown, contingent political futures. On the other hand, this examination must also ask for a genealogy of decision-making and decisionism, as this concept is deeply rooted in the history of political and legal thought. However, ideas of cybernetic ecosystems and ubiquitous computing change how we envision systems and how decisions are being made at different scales. A critical investigation requires a historicization and alternative political logics of democratic decision-making in data-worlds.
Submission
The edited volume is open to all career levels. We strongly support early career researcher with heterogeneous and transdisciplinary academic backgrounds. We expect a short abstract (400-500 words) that resonate with our observations and go beyond them. We invite critical contributions on datafied decision-making. We aim to edit a bilingual (English/German) volume on datafied decision-making, therefore abstracts and papers can be submitted in English or German. The committee will select the submissions for the edited volume.
Please send your abstracts until August 31th, 2025 per mail to: . After acceptance, authors will be asked to present and discuss a first draft during an online workshop in the second half of January 2026. The deadline for final submissions (max. 30.000 characters) is March 31th, 2026.
Members of the committee
Johanna Charlotte Grosche (Environmental Studies), Schaufler Lab@ TU Dresden
Alexandra Lorch (Law), Schaufler Lab@ TU Dresden
Nelly Saibel (Political Science), Schaufler Lab@ TU Dresden
Contact:
For questions please contact:
Further information about the Schaufler Lab@TU Dresden can be found here.