[Air-L] 4S Toronto 2026 CfA: #248 Remaking the State

[Burcu Baykurt]

Hello AoIR!

If your research touches on how governments are reshaped by data
infrastructures, tech vendors, and/or automated decision systems, I hope
you consider submitting an abstract to the open panel I'm organizing at 4S
this year. Details are below and if you have any questions, please feel
free to email me at bbaykurt at umass.edu. 250-word abstracts are due April
30th.

*Panel ID: 248 Remaking the State: Moral Economies of Gov-Tech and
Automated Governance*

As automated systems become embedded in everyday statecraft, they
reconfigure not only how governments operate but what governments are. This
panel starts from the premise
that contemporary techno-power is co-produced through state institutions
that increasingly govern through code, contracts, and data. Across areas
such as welfare administration, tax systems, border control, public
databases, and urban governance, government data infrastructures are
assetized, state legibility is monetized, and governing knowledge becomes
vendor-dependent.

>From major firms such as Palantir to smaller vendors aspiring to become the
“Google of” housing, transportation, public health, or immigration data,
gov-tech firms insert themselves in everyday practices of public
administration. What values and moral claims justify sharing state capacity
with technology vendors? How do procurement regimes carve out new
boundaries between public and
private authority? And how do bureaucrats, civil society actors, and
grassroots movements contest and reimagine the role and limits of
state-held data? These questions probe the moral economies underlying
state-tech partnerships, especially as they increasingly intersect with
right-wing and authoritarian political projects and with technological
experiments explicitly mobilized to enforce racist, anti-immigration, and
anti-poor logics.

The panel invites theoretical and empirical papers drawing on STS,
political economy, and critical infrastructure studies to develop
frameworks to intervene in how state authority is dramatized, contested,
and monetized through data infrastructures. Submissions addressing cases in
the Global Majority and pursuing comparative approaches are particularly
welcome.
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