What is your professional background and what is your primary research area?

I am an anthropologist and associate professor at the Center for Alcohol and Drug Research, where my primary research is about social vulnerability and the barriers people in vulnerable positions experience in relation to accessing help in the welfare system. I've done this in projects on COVID-19 for users of drop-in centers, shelters and drug intake rooms, the challenges vulnerable citizens with a Greenlandic background experience in the Danish welfare system, and projects focused on the resources it takes to navigate the welfare system for citizens on a very low income. The idea for my current project on the consequences of digitalization for vulnerable citizens arose through fieldwork in shelters and with street outreach workers, where digitalization seems to pose an increasing challenge, both in an everyday life on the street, and for the workers who seek to bridge the gap between citizens and, for example, the healthcare system.

What is your current AIAS/SHAPE research project about?

The research project "A street-level examination of digital service journeys among socially marginalized people" sheds light on the consequences of digitization for socially vulnerable citizens' access to health-related solutions. I do this by examining what user journeys in the digitized healthcare system can look like for people who move in an intersection between drug use and homelessness. I use the user journeys to highlight the discrepancy between the highly idealized user journeys used in digitalization strategies - which, for example, show people moving smoothly in a healthcare system with seamless digital technologies, healthcare professionals with almost real-time updated information about citizens' disease status, and engaged relatives - and real user journeys at street level. The latter is challenged by a lack of access to technologies (e.g. phones or code viewers that are often lost), systems that do not communicate, excess energy in an already pressured everyday life, the randomness of whether you meet digital support persons such as street-level workers etc., and a lack of analog alternatives to digital solutions.

What impact do you expect the project to have on society or your research field?

I hope that the project can help to highlight the barriers that people in very vulnerable positions experience in relation to accessing services in the welfare system. By shedding light on more real user journeys, and thus the places where the digitized system becomes too complex or contradictory, we can learn more about where people drop out or give up on getting access to the help they need. Furthermore, the project shows some of the many good solutions that are being developed locally and on an ad hoc basis - for example, in street outreach - but which are not necessarily extended to the wider population. Against this background, I also hope that the project can help to emphasize the importance of both supporting the crucial bridge-building work that is carried out at street level, but also thinking more generally in terms of better structural and more flexible digital solutions.