[Commlist] CFA Digital Mental Health: A symposium

Call for abstracts: Digital Mental Health: An international symposium
3-4 December 2024, University of Turku, Finland (Abstracts due Aug 1)

The digitalisation of mental healthcare is a major transnational trend 
and emergent business, taking diverse forms from digitised 
psychotherapies to AI-generated chatbots, and from peer support on 
social media to organisational data-mining. These themes lie at the core 
of a symposium on digital mental health, to be held at University of 
Turku on 3-4 December 2024. The event consists of public keynotes by 
Professor Adrienne Evans (Coventry University, UK) and Professor Katrin 
Tiidenberg (Tallinn University, Estonia) and a two-day workshop where 
participants’ work-in-progress papers will be commented on by the 
keynote speakers, organizers and fellow participants.

We invite abstracts from researchers across all career stages, from PhD 
students to established scholars, who are interested in the topic of 
digital mental health. Being situated at the intersections of various 
disciplines (e.g. digital cultural studies, media studies, sociology and 
gender studies), the symposium welcomes submissions across disciplinary 
boundaries and geographical locations.

The symposium will be followed by a publication of a special issue on 
digital mental health, edited by Adrienne Evans, Marjo Kolehmainen and 
Katrin Tiidenberg (in alphabetical order), in 2025.  In particular, we 
look for submissions that address the wide topic of digital mental 
health from intersectional, feminist and anti-racist perspectives, with 
research designs that seek to erode dichotomies such as health/illness, 
human/technology, mind/body, good/bad and/or that address digital mental 
health beyond individualized treatment and recovery narratives. They may 
include but are not limited to the following themes:

Digital technologies and mental health care
How digital technologies, from specific health technologies to popular 
platforms, reconfigure mental health care? What forms of professional 
care, peer support or self-care digital technologies facilitate or degrade?
How does AI transform mental health care?  What kind of challenges and 
possibilities are intertwined in the processes of integrating AI in 
mental health care?
How algorithms entangle with mental well-being or mental ill-being? How 
does algorithmic surfacing and content moderation shape individual and 
collective encounters with technology?
How does digital materiality take part in the processes of psychic 
well-being? How for instance wearable technology or self-tracking 
applications transform the relation between mind and body?

Social media and mental health
What kind of affective online communities are generated around mental 
health topics? What kind of ambivalences and asymmetries can be traced 
in different mental health participatory cultures and related discourses 
and practices of care?
How does online peer support renew practices of care? What kind of 
challenges and tensions can be found in the circulation of lay 
expertise, such as the promotion of self-diagnosing practices?
How do good life narratives and expectations for mental positivity shape 
digital mental health platforms and practices? What kind of norms, 
values and expectations are embedded in the ideas concerning good mental 
health?
How are different vulnerabilities maintained, produced and challenged 
through online encounters? What role do intersecting categories like 
age, gender, sexuality, class or race play in the patterns of digital 
inclusion/exclusion?

Postdigital cultures of mental well-being
How does the digitalisation of mental health interact with wider 
cultural crises and global unease?
How do psychopolitical aspects entangle with postdigital cultures?
How does sanism manifest in postdigital cultures, and how to increase 
online safety for all? How do different mental challenges materialise in 
digital encounters?
What frameworks can we develop to help us make sense of reported 
emotional distress due to digital technologies, and the redirection of 
this distress back to digital platforms? How does the networked blurring 
of the public and the private condition possibilities for mental well-being?
How might digital mental health be revolutionized by concepts of 
critical kindness, feminist wellness, or radical self-care? How to 
re-think ‘mad knowledges’ in digitalized societies?

The politics of digitalized services
What kind of consequences do mental health datafication and data 
economies have? What kind of patterns of exclusion and digital divides 
datafication processes produce?
How does the use of different digital tools advance (or fail to advance) 
more inclusive mental health care services? What kind of possibilities 
and challenges digital services from virtual reality to mobile 
applications provide in mental health provision?
How do clients and patients experience the use of digital services? What 
kind of activism or resistance can be identified in relation to 
digitalisation of mental health care?
What kind of risks and vulnerabilities are intertwined in the processes 
where digital technologies take part in mental health care? How 
different forms of surveillance, control or coercion take place and 
affect the use of digital services?


Please submit your abstract (max. 300 words) and a short bio (max. 200 
words) by August 1, 2024 to (lahean /at/ utu.fi). Additionally, please express 
your interest in contributing to the planned Special Issue.

Decisions on acceptance will be made by the end of August. The maximum 
number of accepted papers will be 12. Participation is free of charge, 
but participants are expected to cover their own travel and 
accommodation costs and meals. The accepted participants are expected to 
submit a work-in-progress paper of max 8 pages by November 15, 2024. The 
papers will be circulated among the participants to facilitate discussion.

For further information, please visit 
https://www.dataintimacy.fi/en/event/digital-mental-health-a-symposium 
or contact: Laura Antola at (lahean /at/ utu.fi)


Organising committee: Marjo Kolehmainen (University of Turku) (chair), 
Tuuli Kurki (University of Helsinki), Elina Ikävalko (University of 
Helsinki), Jarkko Salminen (Tampere University) and Laura Antola 
(University of Turku).

The workshop is jointly organized by:
Intimacy in Data-Driven Culture (IDA), a research consortium funded by 
the Strategic Research Council at the Research Council of Finland
Networked Care: Intimate Matters in Online Mental Health Care (NetCare), 
a research project funded by the Research Council of Finland
Visibilising Counter-Stories of Mental Health (MadEnCounters), a 
research project funded by the Kone Foundation
Research Network on Mental Health in Social Science 
(Yhteiskuntatieteellisen mielenterveystutkimuksen verkosto)


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