In May 2026, DigiCon will host a Blog Post Symposium on the topic ‘Humanity in the Automated State’.
Automated systems have become integral to the everyday operations of the modern state: from algorithmic tools that assist in welfare allocation, policing, and immigration screening, to platforms that shape public-sector management and citizen engagement. These technologies promise efficiency, objectivity, and scalability, but they also raise urgent questions about what it means to be human in a system that no longer simply serves us but often acts upon us.
The Symposium explores the condition of humanity within the automated state, examining how algorithmic governance reshapes fundamental legal concepts and human relationships with public authority. Decisions once made through human judgment are increasingly filtered through data-driven processes, where bureaucratic discretion gives way to algorithmic classification and legal entitlements become mediated by software. As state power operates through these automated systems, individual rights, human dignity and autonomy, and procedural safeguards face unprecedented challenges, raising critical questions about accountability, procedural justice, fairness, and the rule of law.
The Symposium accompanies a lecture series of the same name held at Leiden University throughout the 2025/2026 academic year. The lecture series brings together leading scholars including Christine Moser (VU Amsterdam), Aya Rizk (Linköping University), Sofia Ranchordás (Tilburg University/Luiss Guido Carli), Madalina Busuioc (VU Amsterdam), Mengchen Dong (Max Planck Institute for Human Development), Ida Koivisto (University of Helsinki), and Natali Helberger (University of Amsterdam) to examine how the automation of state authority affects fundamental aspects of the human experience: being recognized as individuals rather than data points, participating meaningfully in decisions that affect us, protecting those made vulnerable by algorithmic bias, and maintaining space for resistance and appeal. For more information about the lecture series, including full session details and registration, please visit: https://www.universiteitleiden.nl/en/law/institute-of-public-law/europa-institute/events/lecture-series-humanity-in-the-automated-state
We invite expressions of interest from scholars across law, management, public administration, computer science, and adjacent fields. Contributions that engage with themes raised by specific speakers in the lecture series are particularly welcome, as are submissions from early-career scholars.
Contributions may examine themes such as:
1. Human Dignity and Autonomy: Exploring how automated state interactions preserve or erode individual dignity and self-determination
2. Care, Empathy, and Human Judgment: Examining what happens to discretion, empathy, and individualized care in optimization-driven environments
3. Transparency and Explanation: Analyzing requirements for transparency and comprehensible reasoning in automated administrative decisions
4. Human Oversight and Involvement: Investigating models for meaningful human participation in automated decision-making processes
5. Accountability and Oversight: Examining how courts, administrative bodies, and oversight mechanisms adapt to provide accountability when decisions are made through algorithmic systems
6. Access to Justice and Vulnerability: Addressing pathways for meaningful access to justice and legal remedy in algorithmic governance, with particular attention to how automated systems can amplify existing inequalities and create new forms of vulnerability among different groups
7. Constitutional and Legal Adaptation: Examining how legal frameworks, rights, and administrative law doctrines evolve to address algorithmic governance
By attending to the lived realities of algorithmic governance from multiple perspectives, those of legal subjects, organizational actors, and institutional designers, we aim to foster a more nuanced understanding of the automation of public life. In doing so, we ask not only what machines can do for the state, but what kind of state we are becoming through machines, and what kinds of humans we are allowed to be within it.
Expressions of interest should be a maximum of 300 words and submitted to m.fink@law.leidenuniv.nl and d.morozova@law.leidenuniv.nl by 2 February 2026. The Symposium editors – Melanie Fink and Daria Morozova – will select a small number of submissions to be worked out into full blog posts. The full blog posts should be between 1,000 and 1,500 words and will have to be submitted by 6 April 2026. The Symposium will launch in May 2026 and will later be compiled into a DigiBook (find examples of previous DigiBooks here: https://digi-con.org/category/symposia/digibook/).
We look forward to hearing from you!
On behalf of the DigiCon,
Melanie Fink, Daria Morozova
(The Scientific Organisers of the DigiCon Symposium)
Melanie Fink
Melanie Fink is Associate Professor of European Law at Leiden University. Her research explores the intersection of digital public administration and EU law from an individual rights perspective.
Daria Morozova
Daria Morozova is Assistant Professor at the Department of Business Studies at Leiden Law School. Her research explores what it means to be human at work, examining how people perceive their capacities in the artificially intelligent world, what makes people successful in changing environments, and how the ways we speak about the world shape our experiences.
