October Research-in-Progress Seminar: Care, Homelessness, and Social Service Systems

The Open Cities Platform brings you another edition of their Monthly Research Seminars, an engaging and collaborative space designed for Research Masters, PhD candidates, and all UU researchers and students from the departments of Media and Culture Studies, Anthropology, Human Geography and Spatial Planning, and beyond. This month, the Open Cities research-in-progress seminar has the pleasure to present the work of Stephanie Livingstone, a guest researcher at Utrecht University from RMIT University, Melbourne, based at ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-making and Society. We also have the pleasure to have Prof. Annette Markham as a paper discussant. 

In this seminar, Stephanie will share her work-in-progress PhD chapter on entanglements of care, digital social services and youth homelessness in an Australian context. Her work is situated in the context of the increasing digitisation and automation of social services at a global level, as automated decision-making (ADM) tools and systems increasingly permeate welfare systems around the world. Since 2017, Australia has followed suit, digitising and automating social services in pursuit of cost savings, streamlined citizen interactions and more complex data analysis. However, these affordances have been overshadowed by devastating consequences for vulnerable welfare recipients. Increasing numbers of case studies globally demonstrate that automated processes in social services have repeatedly precluded access to income support, housing assistance, social security, healthcare and other important services.  

Stephanie’s work centres on the impacts of this for young people at risk of and experiencing homelessness, who are highly dependent on social services and welfare. For instance, in Stephanie’s PhD research with young homeless people and social workers in Melbourne, Australia, young people reported instances of ceased welfare payments, the issuing of incorrect debt notices and multiple other automated barriers to accessing social security and housing. Stephanie’s research demonstrates that the consequences of this are devastating for young homeless people across material, affective and psychological dimensions. In the socio-technical ecosystem of digital social services, care is obscured in these contexts as fleeting, conditional, and undeserved. In discussing findings and reflections from her research, Stephanie will explore the ways in which dynamics of care are moulded and shaped by the forced digitisation of social services in an Australian welfare context. Stephanie will also draw on reflections from young people to consider how dynamics of care may be re-built in the digital social service ecosystem through trauma-informed, youth-focused and person-centred ADM design. 

The seminar is hybrid, you will receive a teams link upon registration. It is also followed by drinks if you join us in person.

If you would like to present your work-in-progress in this series, please email (opencities@uu.nl) to access the sign-up file.