Algorithmic systems promise flow, efficiency, and cost-effectiveness, but research has consistently highlighted their negative social impacts. Human aspects are easily sidelined, reinforcing inequalities, undermining democratic processes, and broadening misalignment with public values such as solidarity and autonomy. Current approaches that attempt to mitigate these harms often retreat to abstract and narrow principles, offering limited practical guidance.
REIMAGINE ADM created an alternative route, responding to the need to imagine digital futures through approaches and practical tools that reintroduce human and societal aspects into the making of algorithmic systems. Our aim was to build a shared conceptual vocabulary to understand, assess, and imagine alternative futures of algorithmic systems. Guided by the broader question of how to move beyond isolated case studies, we aimed to develop conceptual tools that reveal the patterns, values, and logics underpinning automation in society.
From this process, a set of initial keywords emerged as particularly productive. These have helped us uncover operational logics, surface embedded values, and examine how people interact with algorithmic systems within broader social and institutional contexts – carving out new spaces for further exploration and collective reflection.
The conference evaluates, substantiates, and expands on this collaborative effort. We aim to create a space for discussing how the intertwinement of values and algorithmic systems can be collectively explored. The discussions in the conference will be grounded in practical cases, but they will go beyond, aiming to establish a common semantic platform for discussing algorithmic systems and their research.
We invite conceptual and empirical contributions that engage with, reflect on, and expand our initial list of keywords below, as well as discussions of similar concepts that can ground the inquiry into algorithmic systems:
• Threshold: A limit or boundary that triggers a response or an action from an algorithmic system.
• Steering: When the system guides the uses and users towards specific goals.
• Codability: Whether a phenomenon, behaviour, process, or experience can be translated into code or not.
• Replacement: The process by which technologies are seen to replace human labour or methods.
• Responsibility: Who is in charge of or accountable for the system’s outcomes.
• Repair: When something in the system doesn’t work as expected, it requires repair.
• Friction: Describes resistance or tension arising in encounters of diverse interests, aims, or qualities.
The conference program will be finalised once we know who will be attending. It will most likely feature a keynote lecture, paper/case presentations, and panel discussion, followed by reflections and provocations from participants based on their own work. The intention is to stay close to concrete cases of algorithmic systems, while also opening toward renewed perspectives on what those systems do more generally. The conference aims for a joint publication on vocabularies for the algorithmic age.
In the conference, presentations and discussions will be supplemented and facilitated with the aid of the
Submitting an abstract
Please submit an abstract of up to 250 words to
Important dates
Deadline for the submission of abstract: January 15, 2026
Notification of paper acceptance: February 2, 2026
Registration: February 3-28, 2026
Conference: March 26-27, 2026, Copenhagen
Organizers
The conference is organized by