Issue 1/2026 of the journal Welfare e Ergonomia, “Welfare and Digital Technologies: Opportunities, Challenges and Innovations”, edited by Giuseppe Luca De Luca Picione, Gabriella Punziano, and Domenico Trezza, has been published.

The issue examines the relationship between society, the transformation of social policies, and digital technologies from different perspectives, viewing the latter as a key driver and context of social change.

Even before facilitating accessibility or making a service faster, digitization intervenes in the ways in which needs are recorded, measured, compared, and transformed into data, while also defining how these needs are viewed and examined by the institutions that determine whether, how, and to what extent to respond to them.

Three strands run through this issue:

• digital technologies as knowledge infrastructure, in relation to the risks and opportunities involved in governing public knowledge and to open science;
• digital technologies in care and healthcare, considering how they interact with professional relationships, territorial asymmetries, and organizational responsibilities;
• professional practices, forms of mediation, and sociotechnical risks accompanying the digitalization of welfare.

Taken together, these contributions offer a non-univocal picture of digital welfare. They highlight its possibilities, but also its frictions; its capacity to generate new forms of knowledge, but also the risk of producing opacity; the promise of supporting services and professions, but also the possibility of separating technical infrastructure from the social contexts in which it is supposed to operate. It is in this ambivalence, rather than in an abstract opposition between innovation and risk, that the meaning of this special issue lies.

Issue 2/2025 of the journal Welfare e Ergonomia, “Rethinking Welfare to prevent and combat gender-based violence”, edited by Pietro Demurtas and Emiliana Mangone, has been published.

This issue analyzes the evolution of the Italian anti-violence system, which originated in the 1970s through the initiative of feminist movements and developed with significant regional differences until achieving greater national coordination following the Istanbul Convention (2013). Today, it is characterized by the complexity of multi-level governance and the need to coordinate often diverse actors and approaches.

Gender-based violence emerges as a testing ground for welfare: as a widespread and persistent phenomenon, it highlights the impact of social and economic inequalities on the possibilities of escaping violence.