Include Network

INCLUDE+ is a network exploring how social and digital environments can be built, shaped and sustained to enable all people to thrive. The five-year programme of activities (2022-2027) will build a knowledge community around in/equalities in digital society that will comprise industry, academia, the public and third sectors in response to the UKRI Equitable Digital Society theme. The uneven ways that civil liberties, work, labour and health have been impacted since the outbreak of Covid-19, as we have turned to digital technologies to sustain previous ways of life, has shown us the extent of inequalities across all societies as they are cut through with health, gender, ethnicity, age, class, opportunity, geolocation. It has also led many organisations and businesses across industry, the public and third sectors, to question values they previously supported. Capitalising on this moment of reflection and recognition of the need for structural change at a policy level, we explore the possibility of imagining and building a future that takes different core values and practices as central and works in very different ways. Wellbeing, precarity and civic culture speak directly to the uppermost concerns of industry, the public and third sectors are prioritising as we emerge from the pandemic. We will- Drive research asking how wellbeing, precarity, and civic culture feed and are generated by, wider structural inequalities (bureaucratic, algorithmic, data-driven, discursive, normative)- Ask how those socio-technical structures are negotiated, lived, felt and intervened into by the communities we work with- Explore and build alternative structures drawing on examples from across the sectors and drawing in experts from within the Network+ into the community-led projects