CALL FOR PAPERS

The 11^th Information Systems Foundations Workshop

“Theorising for Information Systems Resilience in a Turbulent Digital World”

2-3 November 2026
Location: Brisbane, Australia

National Centre for Information Systems Research (NCISR), Research School of Management, Australian National University, in conjunction with the ARC Training Centre for Information Resilience, and the UQ Business School’s Business Information Systems discipline at The University of Queensland.

The 2026 Workshop

The 2026 workshop will be the eleventh in the series of workshops, begun in 1999 by Kit Dampney at Macquarie University and continued biennially from 2002 at the ANU, focussing on the theoretical foundations of the discipline of information systems. This year’s workshop will be held in conjunction with the ARC Training Centre for Information Resilience and the UQ Business School’s Business Information Systems discipline at The University of Queensland.

Previous workshops have generally been regarded by attendees as great successes because they combined thought-provoking presentations with stimulating discussions and highly enjoyable social programmes to complement the more formal part of the gatherings. Many of the papers workshopped at ISF have gone on to be published in highly regarded journal outlets. The workshop enjoys a reputation for providing an atmosphere of helpful, constructive support for new ideas.

High quality papers that have not been previously published are solicited for presentation at the 2026 Workshop. Submitted papers will undergo a double-blind review process, with at least two independent reviewers per paper.

Keynote Speaker – Professor Youngjin Yoo

Youngjin Yoo is Professor of Information Systems and Innovation in the Department of Management at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and Academic Director of LSE Lifelong Learning Digital.

As a leading voice on digital innovation, he has published over 170 peer-reviewed articles, cited more than 33,000 times, in MIS Quarterly, Information Systems Research, Organization Science, the Academy of Management Journal, Harvard Business Review, and Communications of the ACM. His 2010 paper on layered modular architecture is the most-cited work in the field of digital innovation.

A Fellow of the Association for Information Systems, Professor Yoo serves as Senior Editor at Information Systems Research and previously at MIS Quarterly, Journal of Information Technology, Journal of the AIS, and Journal of Strategic Information Systems. He was Program Co-Chair of ICIS 2017. His research has attracted over $10 million from the US National Science Foundation, NASA, the Knight Foundation, the Walmart Foundation, and Samsung Electronics.

Beyond academia, Professor Yoo served as Chief Innovation Architect at University Hospitals Cleveland and has collaborated with Samsung Electronics, LG, Goodyear, Penske, Progressive Insurance, Key Bank, Sotera Health, Sherwin-Williams, and American Greetings. He co-founded Halo Harbour, a privacy-preserving AI platform.

Keynote Speaker – Professor Dirk S. Hovorka

Dirk S. Hovorka is a Professor in the Business Information Systems discipline at The University of Sydney. His current research addresses how scientific and societal practices bring forth ‘worlds’ through theory, design, and conceptualizations of ‘the future’. Recognizing that the future is implacably resistant to full prediction and control, and that increasing rates of societal change render our knowledge about the past less indicative of future states, his research focuses on speculative approaches to ‘knowing’ regarding technology, society, and biophysical environments.

Workshop Theme

“Everything fails, all the time.” – Werner Vogels (Amazon CTO)

As with previous Workshops, this Workshop focuses on the theoretical foundations of information systems. The 2026 workshop concentrates this focus on theorising resilience in technical, informational, organisational, social, and environmental dimensions. Building on the legacy of previous workshops, this event seeks to address the transformations in our socio-technical landscape since the onset of the global pandemic, the rise of AI and digital infrastructures, and the growing urgency of crises such as climate change, misinformation, and deepening social inequities.

A focus on resilience is essential because modern digital environments are no longer defined by occasional, extraordinary disruptions but by continuous, compounding, and everyday shocks. Rather than preparing for a single catastrophic event, organisations, governments, and societies now face a stream of smaller but frequent disruptions, from algorithmic failures and data leaks to supply‑chain disturbances, platform outages, misinformation bursts, and rapid shifts in digital infrastructure. These “everyday shocks” accumulate and interact, producing systemic turbulence that traditional stability‑oriented models cannot address. Resilience, therefore, becomes a foundational concern: it enables information systems to anticipate, absorb, adapt, and recover in ways that support continuity, trust, and equitable outcomes in an environment where disruption is the norm, not the exception.

This calls for a re-examination of how information systems can be designed, governed, and theorised to foster resilience in individuals, organisations, and societies. The resilience lens in the information systems context includes:

• Technical resilience: How systems can withstand failures, cyber threats, or scalability challenges (e.g. AI ethics, secure infrastructures).
• Information resilience: How organisations can create, protect, and sustain agile data pipelines, capable of detecting and responding to failures and risks across the information value chain in which the data is sourced, shared, transformed, analysed and consumed.
• Social resilience: The role of IS in addressing inequality, fostering inclusion, and empowering marginalised communities.
• Environmental resilience: Sustainable practices in IT design, energy-efficient computing, and the ecological footprint of digital systems.
• Organisational and institutional resilience: Theoretical frameworks for navigating disruption in governance, public services, and crisis management.

This workshop seeks to advance critical inquiry into how resilience in information systems can be theorised, ensuring that our theoretical foundations remain responsive to the complexities of the 21st century.

We invite submissions that challenge, critique, or advance theoretical understandings of resilience in information systems. Papers may explore how existing theories (e.g. actor-network theory, critical realism, complexity science) can be adapted to address resilience challenges, or propose novel conceptual models for understanding the interplay between technology and socio-technical ecosystems under stress. We welcome papers that challenge, address, highlight or improve the purpose, place, and future of theory in information systems.

Suggested Topics

Suggested topics for the Workshop include (but are not intended to be limited to):

• Resilient digital infrastructures: Designing robust systems in the face of cyber threats, algorithmic bias, or environmental constraints (e.g. IoT resilience, decentralised networks).
• Data, information, AI and resilience: Theoretical tensions between AI’s potential to enhance societal and organisational resilience and risks such as surveillance, automation, and ethical decay.
• Workforce resilience: Theorising how workers, professions, and organisational labour adapt to rapid AI-driven shifts in skills, tasks, autonomy, and identity, including the socio‑technical conditions that enable continuous learning, equitable transitions, and wellbeing in AI‑mediated work environments.
• Resilience in organisational transformation: Governance models, digital innovation strategies, and adaptive leadership in turbulent environments. Also exploring temporality and fluidity of resilience.
• Resilience in crisis contexts: Information systems for pandemic response, disaster recovery, and equitable access to digital resources during emergencies.
• Sustainable information systems: Theoretical frameworks for reconciling technological innovation with ecological and social sustainability.
• Theorising the digital divide: How IS can mitigate inequality while ensuring inclusive participation in the digital economy and society.
• Critical reflections on resilience: Interrogating the political economy of resilience, power dynamics in crisis response, or the co-option of resilience discourses for neoliberal agendas.

We also strongly encourage papers that fall outside the central theme, including contributions that engage with broader theoretical debates, examine contemporary technological phenomena, or advance the philosophical foundations of information systems as a discipline.

Important Dates

• Paper submission date (full paper): 10 July, 2026
• Notification of acceptance/rejection: 21 August, 2026
• Final papers due: 21 September, 2026

Program Chairs

Ida Asadi Someh, The University of Queensland
Sigi Goode, Australian National University (Australia)
Dirk Hovorka, The University of Sydney

Organising Chairs

Avijit Sengupta, The University of Queensland
Maylis Saigot, The University of Queensland

Chair for Doctoral Consortium, Panels and Engagement

Shahrzad Roohy Gohar, The University of Queensland

Program Committee

Joao Baptista (Lancaster University)
Hind Benbya (Western Sydney University)
Andrea Carugati (Copenhagen Business School)
Boh Wai Fong  (Nanyang Technological University)
Ahmed Imran (University of Canberra)
Marta Indulska (The University of Queensland)
Atreyi Kankanhalli (National University of Singapore)
Stan Karanasios (The University of Queensland)
Julia Kotlarsky (The University of Auckland Business School)
Patrick Mikalef (Norwegian University of Science and Technology)
Ilan Oshri (The University of Auckland Business School)
Jan Recker (University of Hamburg)
Kai Reimer (The University of Sydney)
Alex Richardson (Australian National University)
Tapani Rinta-Kahila (Hanken School of Economics and The University of Queensland)
Michael Rosemann (Queensland University of Technology)
Ruonan Sun (Monash University)
Mary Tate (Victoria University of Wellington)
Ofir Turel (The University of Melbourne)
Lauren Waardenburg (ESSEC Business School)

Submission Requirements

Papers are to be submitted electronically to: infsys-foundations@business.uq.edu.au

Paper Format

The workshop invites two types of submissions:

• Completed papers (up to 10 pages, inclusive of references, figures, tables, and appendices)
• Research‑in‑progress papers (up to 6 pages, inclusive of references, figures, tables, and appendices)

As a developmental workshop, ISF particularly welcomes submissions presenting important ongoing research and emerging theoretical ideas.

Paper submission template

Submitted papers must use the workshop paper template:

ISF Workshop Style template 

Other details

Submission of a paper implies that, if it is accepted, at least one author will register for the workshop and present the paper at the workshop.

For further queries, email: infsys-foundations@business.uq.edu.au