Paper short abstract:

Studying Finnish wellbeing services counties’ strategy documents I reflect on what kind of implications the imaginary of quantification may have for the rationalities of giving and receiving care in the public welfare services.

Paper long abstract:

In Finland, the wellbeing services counties face wide-ranging needs to renew and unify their information systems. Large-scale digitalization and utilizing produced data are considered as two of the main solutions to the wicked problems of public healthcare and social services. Data-driven services seek to translate (human) functions into structured data that can be combined and further utilized in knowledge-based management, research, innovation, and business. Research has shown that numbers are efficient in mediating power and shaping relations (Espeland & Yung 2019), but public discourse still evades ethical questions of quantification.

In this presentation, I will discuss how data-driven systems and their logics of quantification are depicted in the statutory wellbeing services counties’ strategy documents. In doing so I reflect on what kind of implications the quantification of welfare services may have for the rationalities of giving and receiving care.

What kind of digital and data-driven futures are imagined in the strategy papers? We have analysed the strategies using the theoretical concept of sociotechnical imaginaries. These imaginaries are seen as social and political worldbuilding; imagination is a cultural resource that describes and directs the possible futures. The results are interpreted through the literature on promissory data (Hoeyer 2019; 2023), data work (Bossen et. 2019) and critiques on New Public Management to highlight diverse but often overlooked aspects of quantification that data-driven systems in welfare services entail.

Paper short abstract:

This paper attends to the politics of designing assessments to measure embodied dispositions in global educational development.

Paper long abstract:

Global development discourses champion the need for expanding infrastructures of measurement, monitoring, and evaluation. The measurement turn in education is evidenced by increasing pressures to collect and utilize large amounts of quantitative data to govern educational best practices. Simultaneously, the integration of psychosocial skills (such as resilience, grit, and emotional regulation) has emerged as a prominent focus within education. At the intersection of these two trends, noticeable demand has grown for the development of innovative new tools to assess how embodied psychosocial dispositions are taken up by young people.

This paper draws on ethnographic interviews with measurement and evaluation “experts,” observation of life skills measurement convenings, and analysis of life skills measurement tools. We argue that competing demands to both “standardize” and “contextualize” in the design and deployment of psychosocial assessment tools generate unruly anxieties and pleasures. Measurement experts within international development head offices highlight the difficulties of designing universalized, cost-effective, scalable tools that are adequately adapted and “translated” across multiple contexts. At the same time, our interlocutors working on measurement projects—particularly across the global South—often express excitement over the possibilities of placing contextualization at the heart of measurement tool design. Contextualized measurement emerges as a potential space of empowerment and even critical resistance. With an attention to the affective atmospheres of measurement, this paper examines the growing impetus to “contextualize” measurement tools, and the uneven and contested power dynamics that shape measurement design.

Paper short abstract:

Birth cohorts provide a quintessential context for examining the corporeal quantification of bodies. We show how in this context numbers are made through shared labour, interembodied practices and socio-technical choreographies that render bodily quantifications as (un)stable, desired and normed.

Paper long abstract:

Quantification of the body is central to research in longitudinal birth cohort studies that follow participants, often intergenerationally from birth throughout their lives, to understand how social experiences and exposures effect development and social or health outcomes. Recording biometric data such as height, weight, body mass to more specialist measurements such as lung function to bone density are routine throughout the life course of cohort participants and their families. Even as birth cohorts are tools and technologies (Gibbon and Pentecost 2019) of emerging fields of biosocial research seeking to examine how the social becomes embodied, they would also seem to be a quintessential context for examining the corporeal quantification of the bodies . Drawing on an international ethnographic comparative study of birth cohorts ‘The Biosocial Lives of Birth Cohorts’ project and fieldwork in 4 regional birth cohort studies in Brazil, UK, Netherlands and Portugal this presentation examines how numbers are made in the routines of birth cohort data collection and how quantification is produced in the practice and collective labour of making and sustaining a birth cohort. Drawing on detailed ethnographic observations of the data collection with cohort participants where bodies are continuously enumerated we show how making numbers in birth cohorts is a reliant ‘interembodied’ (Bunkley 2022) practices that require complex choreographies (Cussins 1996) of technologies and multiple bodies, (both ‘counters’ and ‘counted’) and how numbers are simultaneously (un)stable, desired and normed.

Paper short abstract:

Drawing on empirical research in South Sudan, this paper follows the making of humanitarian headcounts to show how displaced bodies are recognized, counted, and turned into ‘target populations’ for humanitarian intervention, assigning differential value to aggregate life in spatial terms.

Paper long abstract:

Ever since the humanitarian community started responding to ‘internal displacement’ in the 1990s, the effectiveness of such responses has been cast as an information problem: If only humanitarians had access to reliable data about the needs of displaced persons, then they could better identify and deliver aid to assist them. Today, displacement data are collected and circulated on a massive scale and through a range of methods to improve data quality, or how accurately the data collected reflect the needs of displaced persons. Yet, while this process might appear seamless, quantifying mobility is contested terrain, population headcounts sites of frequent debate amongst humanitarian actors. Drawing on 13 months of empirical research on the humanitarian data collection infrastructure in South Sudan, this paper traces how displaced bodies are recognized, counted, and turned into ‘target populations’ for humanitarian intervention. Approaching quantification as both a relational and spatializing practice (Day et al. 2014), I read headcounts as enumerative geographies to argue that the techniques through which ‘need’ and ‘displacement’ are made calculable enable, rather than prevent, their politicization. The paper shows how headcounts come to assign differential value to aggregate life in bounded spatial terms through their making, terms of evaluation that reveal how, where, and whose lives are made to matter in the process of aggregation.

Paper short abstract:

Gender identity measurement, beyond a binary sex question, is increasingly included in survey research to better understand trans and nonbinary populations. This paper investigates negotiations between researchers and gender diverse communities in producing usable data from the messiness of gender.

Paper long abstract:

In recent years, gender diversity has become increasingly datafied; research into trans population sizes has expanded beyond a clinical “prevalence” of rare diagnosis, restricted by gatekeeping, to a self-identified demographic category, with terms like “transgender,” “nonbinary,” and “assigned sex at birth” becoming more normalized through their appearance on forms and surveys. This paper analyzes trans and nonbinary population measurement in the US, where some federal surveys have added gender identity questions, but there is no nationally representative census data on gender identity or trans populations. Political polarization and a lack of standardized measures lead to inconsistencies as questions are skipped in some states, pulled from testing during political administration changes, or updated to reflect terminology shifts. In this paper, perspectives of the “counters” and the “counted” are explored through interviews with researchers developing best practices for measuring gender identity, and interviews with trans and nonbinary people who weigh benefits and risks of disclosing their identities amidst political polarization about trans legal recognition and protections. Measurements of trans and nonbinary populations enact both researchers’ and respondents’ understandings of sex and gender: researchers weigh different evidence bases to decide which measures and categories of sex and gender are most appropriate for their work, while respondents navigate visibility and safety alongside epistemic violences inherent to categorization and quantification of an identity that can be fluid, multiple, and personal. Analysis centers tensions between queer data as modern representation/inclusion (Guyan 2022) and a “queer approach to data” in questioning methods, ethics, and categories (Keilty 2023).

Paper short abstract:

Community-based healthcare requires care providers to convert the intricacies of daily life into metrics that are legible to the state. We examine the wide variation in existing assessments of functional capacity to problematize the expectation that everyday life can be standardized.

Paper long abstract:

Care provision today is characterized by two major historical shifts. The first is the movement of people from care in large institutions where the physical space for caregiving and its methods were highly standardized, to a community based model that emphasizes individualization and personal choice. The second is the increasing use of metrics to document and justify caregiving in our modern neoliberal healthcare system, where people with disabilities and the elderly who require home care qualify for support on the basis of quantifiable medical and financial need.

This paper examines the tension that emerges between need for measurement and the principles of patient-centered care in the United States. Drawing on content analysis of mental competence and functional capacity tests, we argue that the confluence of individualized care and processes of quantification requires care providers to convert the intricacies of daily life into metrics that are legible to the state. While the federal government requires the use of metrics to allocate and design care, there are hundreds of assessment tools used to measure the activities of daily living in the United States. These tests vary widely in who administers them, what they measure, and how they quantify. We examine the variation between these tests to problematize the expectation that everyday life can be standardized.

Paper short abstract:

We analyze four companies focused on capitalizing on the promises of gendered microbiome research (addressing vaginal health and breast milk analogues) and situate them within unsettled science about microbial enumeration and attempts to quantify a “normal” baseline.

Paper long abstract:

The first wave of human microbiome research inaugurated a paradigm of human health and well-being contextualized within an interest in microbial counts and dynamic relations. The second wave has attempted to make those counts matter by translating basic science into products and therapeutics. In this paper we analyze four companies focused on capitalizing on the promises of gendered microbiome research (addressing vaginal health and breast milk analogues) and situate them within research attempts to quantify a “normal” baseline. Such initiatives rely on unsettled science about microbial enumeration, in our cases, that vaginal microbes census can stand as a proxy for vaginal health or that counts of pro/pre-biotic microbial strains can simulate human breastmilk’s microbial contribution to infant development. Drawing on a dataset of companies’ public media, consumer discussion forums, and scientists’ research talks, we trace the development of direct-to-consumer initiatives emerging from human microbiome research. We use these data to analyze how they cultivate an embodied narrative that microbial quantification matters and that revealing these counts opens new possibilities for human health and well-being, while the science behind it is negotiating processes of microbial quantification. We argue, gendered microbiome initiatives present corporeal quantification as an essential tool for addressing persistent challenges in reproductive health while papering over the still incomplete processes of translating basic sciences into applied therapeutics. Focusing on the quest to turn in-process science into applied therapeutics illustrates the microbiopolitics of marketing undetermined science through microbial calculations.

Paper short abstract:

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

Paper long abstract:

Ethnographic 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 scientific knowledge and the broader structures within which data are created.