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- Convenors:
-
Sophie Wagner
(University of Bern)
Lucien Schönenberg (University of Bern)
Darcy Alexandra (University of Bern)
Sanderien Verstappen (University of Vienna)
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- Chair:
-
Michaela Schäuble
(University of Bern)
- Discussant:
-
Karen Waltorp
(University of Copenhagen)
- Format:
- Panel
- Location:
- 6 College Park (6CP), 01/037
- Sessions:
- Friday 29 July, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This panel is interested in the socio-material emergence, fluidity, and impact of biometric data infrastructures, the challenges they introduce, and creative ways for imagining futures otherwise.
Long Abstract:
In light of the all-encompassing manmade catastrophes that pose global challenges, (digital) technological innovations are often framed as the solution to our problems. In this "biometric imaginary" (Donovan 2015), quantification promises to make the unknown identifiable and the variable controllable, leading to a world which increasingly presents itself as preemptive (Avanessian 2018). The future is calculated by technologies and algorithms endowed with an aura of truth, efficiency, objectivity and inevitability (Sapignoli 2021), fostering certain narratives while others are dismissed. The tendency to respond to these technological developments with a backward-oriented lust for deceleration, believing that technology estranges us from human "nature", not only overlooks the everyday human and more-than-human co-creation of knowledge and experience, but also clouds the need to act on the immanent, hidden costs. These include the centralization of knowledge, the concentration of power into private companies, changing notions of responsibility and privacy and the creation of new patterns of exploitation, for example.
This panel asks what we might learn for the present, if we can imagine futures against the odds (Stengers 2002). We invite ethnographic accounts that address processes of knowledge decentralization (i.e. open source databases/participatory technology design), attempts to create and imagine alternative future data infrastructures and possible ways toward a new (global) solidarity, processes of undermining/circumventing/adapting existing technologies for alternative uses (wearables, algorithms, "security" devices,...), and strategies of dealing with unfulfilled promises of technologies and the vulnerabilities that unforeseeable trajectories create. We especially encourage multimodal ethnographies that involve film, photography, creative writing, and/or sensory ethnography.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 29 July, 2022, -Paper short abstract:
As FemTech enterprises increasingly ‘disrupt’ sexual and reproductive healthcare provision to ‘empower’ women in Kenya, this paper asks how digital infrastructures, data flows, and commodified ‘reproductive futures’ are imagined and dispersed across Nairobi's tech-ecosystem and informal settlements.
Paper long abstract:
With the rapid growth of ICT, mobile health services, and ‘empowering’ development approaches in Sub-Saharan Africa (Folaranmi 2014), the recent emergence of Female Technology (FemTech) seems particularly attractive for low-ressource contexts in which women’s sexual and reproductive health (SRH) services remain limited. Considering pervasive shifts to digitalise and privatise healthcare delivery across Kenya, social enterprises are increasingly filling the void of healthcare provision by framing innovative technologies as ‘empowering’ or ‘disruptive’ solutions to solve women’s SRH ‘problems’. These digital technologies connect patients with clinicians or other patients, access and query health knowledge, and give insights into one’s own health data. As FemTech smartphone apps, wearables, and diagnostic devices (often using algorithms and AI) expeditiously collect, track, and analyse personal data on women’s bodies and behaviour, questions about modes of surveillance, the origin, the ownership, and the value of women’s health data become more relevant than ever (Lupton 2016; Ruckenstein&Schüll 2017; Neff 2019).
Drawing on my PhD project ‘Bodies of Data’ including eight months of ethnographic fieldwork among Nairobi’s ‘Silicon Savannah’ tech-ecosystem and clinics in informal settlements, this paper reveals how digital infrastructures (Larkin 2013; Donovan 2015) and data flows are imagined, created, and dispersed following a rhetoric of ‘empowerment’ and ‘disruption’. It critically interrogates the webs of (dis)connections and conceptualisations of women’s health data deriving from low-resource settings as an opportunity for value-creation. By tracing commodification practices targeting healthcare disparities and socio-economic inequalities in Kenya, it asks how alternative imaginaries of data-driven ‘reproductive futures’ surface in a gender-specific context.
Paper short abstract:
Semi-automated therapies for type 1 diabetes patients challenge conceptions of the body, experiences of illness and the relationship between patient and health care professionals. How can present day concepts of care cater for emerging vulnerabilities of physical as well as digital bodies?
Paper long abstract:
Digital technologies, robotics, Big Data based systems and artificial intelligence (AI) radically alter understandings of current and future health care systems. Central to these developments is the imagery of the technology-empowered patient, who not only actively contributes to data gathering and sharing (Prainsack 2017), but generally becomes an active member in processes of shared decision making (Erikainen et al. 2019). While it’s necessary to acknowledge the importance of the patient’s active involvement as a contribution to successful therapies, the dynamic also poses challenges: not only is the logic of patient choice somewhat at odds with the logic of care, as Mol (2008) has conclusively shown, but also do recent developments not regard the complex consequences, posed by the co-construction of knowledge and experience between technology and humans. As research with type 1 diabetes (T1D) patients – who use (hybrid) closed loop systems (connected sensors and pumps worn on the body) – shows, it is much more difficult to locate agency and responsibility, than certain narratives make believe. Human and non-human actors, bodily and un-bodied data are the intra-acting components which render the chronic disease complex in its socio-material form. Drawing on Barad (2007), Schwennesen (2019) and Lupton’s (2019) notion of “more-than-human-assemblages” I aim to investigate the precise ways in which the patient’s vulnerability (Coeckelbergh 2013) is transformed, and how the fragility and fluidity of digital and physical bodies, whose boundaries are constantly permeated and expanded, is catered for in present day understandings of care.
Paper short abstract:
What do IA algorithms do in unfair situations? We search here for the resistance movements that questions the neutrality in the development of IA systems, and their emic approach to the common life in the new Demiurge known as 4.0 society with their toolbox chasing for hope and a non-biased present
Paper long abstract:
The intangible space of relation and production of machine-person interaction constructs civic life so intensely that the regulatory institutions of the public sphere, noticing the present impacts and sensing future ones, are forcibly constructing the normative field of the digital sphere. In these frameworks, interesting debates are established about the limitations of the field itself, directed by the ethics of the procedures, reliability, applicability and possibilities of verifying results, as well as the explicability of a technology characterised by a kind of obscurantism; either due to questions of commercial patents or to more sceptical positions about the different models of the procedures that make executive algorithms learn.
Although the study of these new intelligences is mainly focused on the field of the Internet-of-things, we present here a work proposal that questions the development of methodologies that worked before pandemic era and, in the face of these new technological horizons and on the basis of the discourses circulating in the field, questioning the neutrality of these technologies. These critical currents within the circulating discourses are known as XAI - eXplicable Artificial Intelligence - and propose the study of bias analysis in the automation of decisions that are currently creating less just societies, by reproducing current biases through the reproduction of discriminatory situations by the hand of administrative machines, represented here as Artificial Intelligence algorithms.
Paper short abstract:
Within a landscape of deadly migration policies, extractive surveillance infrastructure, and some of the most diverse ecological networks in the Americas, this audio-visual landscape ethnography will examine contesting theories of futurity in the US-Mexico borderlands.
Paper long abstract:
Surveillance technologies hold competing objectives in the US-Mexico borderlands. State surveillance is a long-standing aspect of settler colonialism (Guidotti-Hernández 2011). An everyday reality of life for borderlands dwellers, surveillance statecraft includes a "virtual wall" of integrated fixed towers (IFTs), resource-intensive infrastructure, and the production of massive surveillance data (Miller 2021). In its construction and maintenance, the extraction of precious, limited water resources is essential. On the other side of the equation, environmental scientists, citizen-scientists, and community activists also employ diverse statecraft technologies to study and protect riparian waterways and revitalize threatened watersheds and wildlife travel corridors along the borderland’s "Sky Islands” –mountain ranges connected by a “sea” of radically different, desert lowland environments.
In this context, the landscape itself becomes a protagonist, a character in the process. This presentation will draw from preliminary findings from fieldwork conducted for the Swiss National Science Foundation research, Entre Rios: Surveillance and Futurity in the US Mexico Borderlands, a project positioning the Sonoran Desert as a vital region from which to study contesting theories of futurity. Focusing on the divergent histories of the San Pedro and Santa Cruz watersheds, the audio-visual landscape ethnography examines futurity in relation to notions of security and collective wellbeing. Within this landscape of deadly migration policies, extractive surveillance infrastructure, and some of the most diverse ecological networks in the Americas, the research aims to learn from this expanded landscape, including local stakeholders who are imagining more equitable and livable futures.