[IRIS] Call for Abstracts: From Digitalisation to Artificial Intelligence: New Scenarios for Health and Medicine

Tue Oct 14 09:02:41 EDT 2025

Dear colleagues,

Please consider submitting an abstract for our two-day  conference on the
new scenarios for health and medicine held in Trento (February 2026).

Best wishes,

the organizing committee

-----------------------------------------------------------

*Call for Abstracts*

*Joint Conference AIS - Sociology of Health and Medicine Section / STS
Italia*

*Important Dates*

· Deadline for abstract submission: 30 November 2025

· Notification of outcomes: 15 December 2025

· Conference: 12-13 February 2026

· Venue: Trento, Italy

*From Digitalisation to Artificial Intelligence: New Scenarios for Health
and Medicine*

The increasing diffusion of technologies supporting diagnosis, treatment,
rehabilitation, and administrative management in healthcare is accompanied
by a complex set of socio-technical expectations, which foreshadow profound
transformations in clinical practice and organisational models of services,
with the promise of more integrated, efficient, and sustainable socio
sanitary systems. Although expectations of transformation cyclically
accompany every new "next big thing"; techno-scientifically presented as
revolutionary for the world of care, those that have emerged in recent
years appear qualitatively different, pervasively intertwined with social,
economic, and political dynamics that amplify their potential impact.
Expectations regarding the application of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to
medicine, already present since the 1960s, now appear more concrete due to
its increasing diffusion in multiple areas of social life.

The shared perception that current technological transformations are
structural and not temporary can exert a drag effect, re igniting interest
in innovations that previously remained marginal. Technologies such as
blockchain for data management or robotics in surgical and rehabilitative
fields, which had not previously achieved full integration, could thus find
new application opportunities, contributing to further dynamics of change
in the healthcare sector. The promises of change are embedded within a
transforming framework. On the one hand, the adoption of AI tools moves in
partial continuity with pre-existing healthcare digitalisation processes
(e.g., telecare), whose adoption seems to have spread more rapidly as a
consequence of the pandemic crisis. Compared to these changes, however, AI
is not a simple extension of already known processes but introduces new
logics and issues that require critical re-examination. On the other hand,
the most recent technical innovations are called to confront a changed
economic landscape (e.g., progressive reduction of public spending to
support health services), ideological framework (e.g., health as an
individual responsibility of patients), professional context (e.g., hyper-
specialisation, liability, and professional profile enhancement), and
increasingly complex policy environment (e.g., reforms of national health
policies) that are the result of structural changes in society.

The conference, jointly organised by the Italian Sociological Association
(AIS – Sociology of Health and Medicine Section) and the Italian Society
for Science and Technology Studies (STS Italia), aims to foster dialogue
between two scientific communities that, from complementary perspectives,
contribute to the critical understanding of processes intertwining health,
medicine, and technological innovation. While sharing numerous theoretical
and methodological affinities, the sociology of health and medicine has
traditionally focused on the social, cultural, and ethical dimensions of
illness, care practices, and health policies, investigating themes such as
inequalities, representations of health, and the role of healthcare
professions and organisations. Science and Technology Studies, instead,
have focused more on the analysis of co-production processes between
science, technology, and society, exploring how technologies are designed,
adopted, and regulated, and how they, in turn, shape social practices and
institutional configurations. The complementarity between these two
perspectives will enrich the collective understanding of how emerging
technologies are transforming not only clinical practice but also
experiences of illness and health, relationships between patients and
professionals, and public policies.

In line with a strongly interdisciplinary approach, the conference is open
to contributions from sociology, ethics, law, health economics, computer
science, medicine, and information engineering.

We invite the submission of abstracts exploring a wide range of topics,
including, but not limited to:

· Infrastructuring and governance of healthcare technologies

· Health data management policies

· Health policies and emerging technologies

· Healthcare policies and regulation

· Telemedicine, digitalisation, and new challenges

· Doctor-patient relationship in the digital era

· Ethics and AI in healthcare

· Robotics in healthcare

· Technological innovation and health inequalities

· Public perceptions and social acceptance of emerging healthcare
technologies

· Processes of co-construction of health, illness, and technology

Abstracts should be between 300 and 500 words in length and must be
submitted by 30 November 2025 using the provided form
<https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfhuJ67hDgAld23MSuWd8DN0yMvKQxwmU82w0ye1YNOyfVW5g/viewform?pli=1>
.

Participation in the conference is open to auditors only and does not
require registration fees. All expenses, including meals, are the
responsibility of the participants.

*Organising Committee*

Alberto Ardissone (University of Macerata), Flavia Atzori (Polytechnic
University of Marche), Attila Bruni (University of Trento), Stefano Crabu
(University of Padua), Marta Gibin (University of Bologna), Francesco Miele
(University of Trieste), Veronica Moretti (University of Bologna), Enrico
Maria Piras (Bruno Kessler Foundation), Barbara Sena (University of Bergamo)

For any information, please contact Enrico Maria Piras at piras at fbk.eu.

-- 

Enrico Maria Piras <https://ehealth.fbk.eu/people/profile/piras>, PhD
researcher at Health & Wellbeing Center, Fondazione Bruno Kessler
<http://www.fbk.eu/>
Office: +39 0461 314126

Associate Editor -Sociology Compass- Section "Health & Science"

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