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Paper short abstract:

In the Catalan Pyrenees, counting sheep is a collective and fuzzy practice that responds to institutional demands and seasonal changes. The multiple acts of counting sit at the intersection between navigating intricate subsidy systems and resisting drastic changes to the shepherds' livelihood.

Paper long abstract:

In the Catalan Pyrenees, in Spain, sheep breeders count sheep as part of their entrepreneurial practice. Counting sheep, as a practice is a collective endeavour, spread among multiple bodies, and that requires specific set-ups. On different occasions throughout the year, counting sheep requires dealing with seasonal changes such as weather and sheep geographic displacement. As a result, counting sheep is quite a fuzzy endeavour. Managing the herd’s numbers responds to both the varying objectives of counting, and the physical conditions that underlie it.

The sheep herd number, however, regulates both sheep breeders’ income and subsidy quota, and their ability to collaborate and work with other shepherds. On the one hand, shepherds are legally required to share their numbers with the Agriculture Department to obtain their subsidy quotas. On the other hand, sharing numbers with others helps shepherds understand what to expect from each other and “count on” each other – knowing who they can share pastures with.

Thus, counting becomes quite a political and social act. Different understandings of how accurate and how often counts should happen reflect varying degrees of changes that shepherds’ livelihoods should encompass. This paper analyses how counting sits at the intersection between navigating (and gaming) intricate institutional benefits and socialising resistance against drastic changes to the shepherds' livelihood.

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This paper explores how women in Turkey share self-tracking data, such as step counts, on Instagram to quantify and render visible their labor at home. By translating embodied labor exploitation into numbers, women challenge the newly redrawn home-workplace boundary in neoliberal digital capitalism.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores how a group of women in Turkey shares self-tracking data, such as step counts or calorie scores, on Instagram to quantify and render visible their labor and productivity at home. Although neoliberal, digital capitalism makes it harder to distinguish home and workplace, my digital ethnography with woman Instagram users highlights that women working from home feel a home-workplace separation that renders their labor invisible. My participants serve as both primary caregivers in their families and digital laborers, earning income through Instagram accounts with more than 20K followers. For these women, work includes both unpaid and paid labor carried out at home. Women care for their children, cook, and clean without immediate monetary return, while also producing content on Instagram that generates income. They struggle to prove their productivity when completing both of these tasks because they believe that being registered as productive still requires working at a designated workplace. Sharing photographs on Instagram that display smartwatch numbers, such as reaching 7,000 steps while working at home, aims to publicly showcase typically invisible gendered productivity. By translating embodied labor exploitation into quantified data, smartwatches provide women with a new form of information, enabling them to challenge the newly redrawn home-workplace boundaries under neoliberal digital capitalism. If neoliberalism continues to exploit women’s labor by rendering their contributions in the market economy invisible simply because they work at home, quantifying labor at home and putting it on public display via Instagram becomes a way of challenging this capitalist disguise.

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This paper will examine the politics behind the production of state knowledge on marginality and the uneasy forms of citizenship that are engendered when infrastructures are labeled as inclusive but experienced as exclusionary, asking: what does it mean to be numerically produced as disabled?

Paper long abstract:

Through ethnographic attention to the question of who officially comes to be counted as disabled in India, this paper will examine the politics behind the production of state knowledge on marginality and the uneasy forms of citizenship that are engendered when infrastructures are labeled as inclusive but experienced as exclusionary. Specifically, the paper asks: what does it mean to be numerically produced as a disabled citizen? How do bureaucratic structures and medical attempts to make the disabled body knowable influence and come to be influenced by everyday experiences of the embodiment of disability? Finally, how do these everyday attempts to count and be counted influence the varied temporalities of both violence and disabled experiences? Through this paper, I will examine the ways in which discourses on counting the disabled population as paradoxically work at once to produce citizens who are managed and made legible within a known category while often continuing to stigmatize and exclude these citizens. By tracing the production of embodied otherness through attention to the interactions between disabled citizens, activist groups, and the government, this paper outlines the ways in which bureaucratic facts are produced, challenged, or confirmed as authoritative, objective knowledge. The paper further extends scholarship from the anthropology of disability and STS to attend to the ways in which the processes of identifying, quantifying, and certifying disabled citizens generates a form of ordinal citizenship, i.e., a belonging by degree, and by extension a state of prolonged and perpetual uncertainty for those who seek official recognition.

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Paper short abstract:

While the question of how many doctors a healthcare system needs has long animated the correspondence columns of medical journals, this paper interrogates the problematics and politics that have encircled such planning, in various ways, since the end of WWII.

Paper long abstract:

The perennial question of how many doctors the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) needs is often answered in one word: “more”. The question itself sounds as if it should be data-driven, calculable and amenable to some kind of quantitative logic. Yet, health workforce (or what used to be called “manpower”) planning efforts have arguably been characterised by their ‘ad hocery” from the very inception of the NHS (Maynard and Walker, 1977, 62). Indeed, it was only in 2023 that a NHS Workforce Plan was finally published after roughly two decades without any kind of strategy, despite repeated warnings of a ‘staffing crisis’. This paper therefore starts in the present and refers back to the past to consider the power and politics of (a persistent lack of data) for health workforce planning.

While the question of how many doctors a healthcare system needs has animated the correspondence columns of medical journals such as the BMJ and the Lancet, the problematics that encircle such planning have not yet captured the attention of anthropologists. Given that the ‘medical manpower problem’ is one of global scale and scope, the issues of ‘data’ – and where to find them – are even more profound. Even now, data on the number of medical personnel actively employed, flows of medical migration, training patterns and career trajectories is imperfect even in the richest of countries. And, without accurate data in the present, planning for future staffing needs will only be ‘ad hoc’ and its accompanying politics fraught.

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Paper short abstract:

To prove the need for and impact of anti-discrimination policies, municipalities monitor discrimination and keep records of reported cases. While administrators need such data to legitimize their work, they challenge the use of contested indicators and the quantification of complex social phenomena.

Paper long abstract:

With numerical data on discrimination and on the effectivity of anti-discrimination interventions, public administrators responsible for ‘diversity policies’ hope to ‘map’ and ‘make visible’ discrimination. Committed to create ‘more knowledge’ about discrimination, these administrators ground their policy interventions in quantified data produced by a range of actors—including national government actors, national knowledge institutions, municipal departments, data registration offices, and civil society organisations. The data composed in these dispersed knowledge practices can however not easily be mapped on to each other: in data on racism, for instance, different indicators are used, which renders datasets on ‘race/skin colour,’ ‘nationality’ and ‘origin/colour’ difficult to align. Next to juggling with incomparable datasets, administrators challenge the use of indicators that they think of as re-instantiating discrimination and bring the politics of category-making itself under the attention of research organisations they collaborate with. In dealing with these in-equivalent and contested indicators, municipal administrators find themselves positioned in a politically sensitive policy field. In the past, bureaucrats have been publicly accused by conservative MPs for hiding specific data (e.g. discrimination of ‘LGBTI-people’ by ‘Moroccan people’), which has raised awareness among municipal administrators about number politics. To anticipate these number politics, administrators seek and create momentum to publish reports and try to re-embed dislocated knowledge by 'adding context to numbers'. Based on ongoing multi-sited field research in the Netherlands, this paper builds on work in anthropology of technology and critical diversity studies to demonstrate how political pressures in knowledge-making about anti-discrimination contribute to the non-performativity of ‘diversity policies.’

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Paper short abstract:

Statistical data have become a mainstay of public discourse and social life. This paper analyses the complex acts of mediation that enumerators perform while navigating survey sites and seeks to unpack the labour and social processes that underlie the production of large-scale numerical knowledge.

Paper long abstract:

Anthropological accounts of statistical production have emphasised the considerable work of interpretation and translation that accompanies the construction of universal numerical measures for socio-economic phenomena (Merry 2010; 2015). While much of this literature has focused on the role of technocrats and policy elites in data value chains, a growing scholarship has emerged that seeks to analyse the crucial labour of enumerators and front-line workers in the production of data (Kingori 2013; Seth 2018). Drawing on such work, this paper examines the epistemic role of enumerators in large-scale surveys. Based on an ethnography of a health policy survey in central India, it shows the complex social role that enumerators play in the survey process. Enumerators utilise a range of tacit practical skills to perform tasks that are necessary for surveying such as building rapport with respondents and explaining complex terms in questionnaires. Further, they rely on implicit knowledge to navigate administrative hurdles and forms of social hierarchy that they encounter at survey sites. This paper argues that the labour performed by enumerators is itself “ethnographic” in nature and seeks to highlight its centrality for the production of socio-economic data. It also provides details of how enumerators are hired and managed in the context of customised surveys commissioned by development organisations and contracted to private survey firms. By focusing on the complex forms of socio-cultural mediation that enumerators undertake during surveys, this paper seeks to advance scholarship on the sociology of quantification and the broader socio-political structures within which data are created.

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Paper short abstract:

Based on ethnography of the Bank of England, this paper traces how the Bank’s Agents translate between different epistemic modalities, navigating the different authority imbued in distinct aesthetics of data.

Paper long abstract:

Central banks draw on heterogenous practices of knowledge production to map ‘the economy’, with different epistemic modalities from mathematical modelling to interviews with large and small businesses. In the UK, the Bank of England has a network of Agents across country to assemble understandings of emerging inflationary dynamics through interviews with ‘contacts’, usually executives of firms. This paper is based on 6 months’ ethnography with this Bank of England network, including direct participant observation of over 80 interviews between Agents and contacts, and further ethnography with Agents themselves. It traces how Agents assemble understandings of ‘the economy’, and how they situate their knowledge practices within the broader landscape of epistemic modalities within the Bank. Agents struggle to appeal to forms of epistemic authority that are imbued in aesthetics of quantitative data: as one Agent put it to me, ‘there are ‘killer charts’, but there’s no such thing as a killer bullet point.’ The paper explores how different understandings ‘data’ are navigated, translated and mediated, and how these are situated within wider political relations that are currently contested in economics. In doing so, leverages this ethnography of the Agents to reflect on the role of ethnography within anthropology.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the mobilization of differing notions of community and patienthood in the creation and maintenance of digital infrastructures for hearing aids. I critically examine the sensual character of extractive economies and their alternatives in the day-to-day life of hearing aid users.

Paper long abstract:

In the wake of the datafication of audiology and medical hearing devices, new forms of community and patienthood are being evoked: Newly emerging AI-based hearing aid applications allow users to impact the configurations of their hearing aids more actively and in a time-sensitive manner. So far, this task has largely been reserved for audiologists, who relied on a mix of auditory listening tests as well as listening to their patients’ experiences. This practice is now being accompanied - and in some cases replaced - by machine learning-based recommender systems. These ML-based hearing aids promise to expand and automate forms of medical listening and decision-making by drawing on a multitude of data streams derived from overlapping forms of senses and sensing devices (Lupton 2017, Maslen 2017). This ranges from the reading of geo- and bio-data, as well as the collection of user input, to data collected from hearing aid users worldwide. These data streams are being understood as a form of algorithmically mediated production of community. In addition, they are staning in contrast to pre-existing forms of knowledge-creation and data management of not only healthcare professionals but also of activists and users.

Drawing on six months of ethnographic fieldwork in Austria, Germany, and Denmark, this paper critically examines competing notions of solidarity, community, and well-being that are being mobilized by healthcare companies, Big Data’s extractive economies, as well as hearing aid users and activists. I especially highlight the sensual character of data production and data infrastructures and ask how these narratives produce different types of digital infrastructures (Larkin 2013; Donovan 2015), imbued with and mobilized by differing politics and understandings of “good” patients – individually and collectively.

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Paper short abstract:

“Data, data, data, that’s the solution,” a senior peace negotiator says when asked how the humanitarian sector can mitigate future crises. But is data an answer or rather a question? This text asks what happens when humans and other complicated realities are condensed and translated into numbers.

Paper long abstract:

From his office in snowy Uppsala in northern Sweden, Michael goes through drone footage of battles at the Ukrainian front line. His job is to make qualified guesses about how many of the soldiers he sees being hurt on his screen are going to die in the field, and to feed this number to UCDP’s database that monitors death tolls following from violence. In the humidity of a former bus station in Cali, Colombia, Carmen’s work consists of taking fingerprints with an app, listening to personal stories of in- and externally displaced people, and compiling it all in a UNHCR database. Michael and Carmen are translators: They convert human complexities into numerical simplicities.

Numbers are prima facie static, neutral, and calculable entities. For this reason, the numbers produced by Michael and Carmen come to have highly tangible – often even existential – consequences as they travel to inform global (non)governmental policies and operations. But because of the mandates of UCDP and UNHCR, their data production is inherently messy, uncertain, and dependent on access, prior knowledge, and perspectives of their translator.

Michael and Carmen are acutely aware of the discrepancy. They attribute it to a lack of data literacy among those that use their data. A well-translated number is not necessarily precise; it is rather an entity found through a balancing act of caring about details of all humans alike without getting lost in caring about the singular human case. To them, this makes the number as correct as possible.

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Paper short abstract:

I explore how Irish HIV activists strategically deployed public health data to create and sustain demand for preventative medication. I argue that this politics of data concealment reveals the fragility of allyship across axes of queerness, race, class, and citizenship in contemporary Ireland.

Paper long abstract:

From 2015 until 2019, the rising number of HIV diagnoses was the unifying issue for HIV activists in Ireland. Deploying public health data in tandem with crisis rhetoric, activists used publicly available health data to successfully lobby the government for subsidized preventative medication, known as PrEP (pre-exposure prophylaxis). However, the data activists cited aggregated both novel diagnoses of HIV and cases where the person was previously diagnosed outside of Ireland but new to care within the Irish system. While novel cases actually decreased slightly between 2015 and 2019, previously diagnosed cases increased dramatically during the same period. Activists strategically concealed these divergent trends and focused on the overall increase in order to sustain media and popular attention on their work. Drawing on work in critical public health on the use of statistics in evidence-based health policy (Adams, in Bihel and Petryna 2013), neoliberal policy in public health (Schecker and Bambra 2015), as well as multimodal field research conducted between 2019 and 2023, I explore how activists justified their choice to leave data ambiguous in terms of both moral obligation and strategic value. While activists succeeded in their strategic efforts to increase access to HIV prevention, I argue that the moral obligation reveals both a conceptual investment in solidarity and a simultaneous undoing of allyship across axes of queerness, race, class, and citizenship in contemporary Ireland.