Conference: The normativity of sustainable digitality

A conference at the University of Kassel is looking at the interactions between digitalization and the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals. It will take place on May 5 and 6, 2022 in the university's Gießhaus. Prof. Dr. Claus Leggewie will give the keynote speech.

The United Nations has formulated 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to ensure sustainable development on an economic, social and ecological level worldwide. Digitalization in particular poses new challenges for achieving the goals, but its transformational nature can also open up new opportunities. However, potential conflicts and synergies between the SDGs in general and digitalization in particular have hardly been researched.

The conference will address this area of tension from a largely normative perspective, focusing on the opportunities and challenges of sustainable digitality. A key topic will be which unquestioned assumptions are hidden in the SDGs and which explicitly or implicitly convey certain ideas about the shapeability or transformability of society. In his keynote speech, Prof. Dr. Claus Leggewie, University of Giessen, will outline the topic of "Digitalization and sustainability - a difficult relationship".

Following this, three panels with presentations and commentaries will take an interdisciplinary look at the challenges, potentials and risks of the diverse relationships between sustainability and the normative requirements of social coexistence. The potentials of sustainable digitality for intelligent dematerialization between production and consumption (Prof. Dr. Christa Liedtke, Wuppertal Institute), the legal responsibility for innovation for sustainability of and through AI (Prof. Dr. Alexander Roßnagel, Hessian Commissioner for Data Protection and Data Security and University of Kassel) and design principles for information systems in achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (Dr. Anne Ixmeier, LMU Munich) will be discussed.

The conference is open to the public. It is organized by the project group "Sustainable Intelligence - Intelligent Sustainability" of the Centre for Responsible Digitalization (ZEVEDI). Its spokesperson is Prof. Dr. Gerrit Hornung, Professor of Public Law, IT Law and Environmental Law, and Prof. Dr. Jörn Lamla, Professor of Sociological Theory, both at the University of Kassel. The conference program and schedule are available at https://www.uni-kassel.de/forschung/iteg/veranstaltungen/nachhaltige-digitalitaet. Please register in advance at iteg[at]uni-kassel[dot]de.