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- Convenors:
-
Heidrun Åm
(NTNU)
Karoliina Snell (University of Helsinki)
Heta Tarkkala (University of Helsinki)
Mette N. Svendsen (University of Copenhagen)
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- Format:
- Traditional Open Panel
Short Abstract:
This panel explores the socio-material practices involved in coproducing resources and goods—from health data, gene editing tools, artificial intelligence, aquaculture, oil, crops, or other— and incentives for creating collective goods in a growth economy.
Long Abstract:
STS scholarship provides plenty of evidence for how science and technology facilitate continuous extraction of economic value from human life and nature, and how power concentrations are inherent in this development. In recent years, STS scholarship has also explored resource extraction beyond profit- or control incentives and demonstrated that assetization dynamics need not dominate the making of sociotechnical resources.
This session starts from the insight that collective goods involve a sense of collective control and governance (Geiger 2021). We wish to explore how collective goods are resourced and bring about transformations. In particular, we want to bring into spotlight the sociotechnical practices of imagining and incentivizing collective goods and the involved understandings of ‘collective’ and ‘good’. We also wish to discuss how these developments can be guided to serve publics in specific locations and more widely. We are particularly but not exclusively interested in topics such as health data, gene editing tools, artificial intelligence, aquaculture, oil, or crops.
We welcome papers that address questions such as:
What imaginations, practices, and governmental regimes are involved in creating resources and turning them into collective goods?
What does it take to administer sociotechnical resources as collective goods? Who (and what) benefits?
What are the reasonings that operate when collective incentives gain traction?
How do actors navigate tensions between capitalist economies and collective goods? Are there new, alternative ways to benefit from collective goods, for example, beyond capitalist logics?
Our aim is to critically map and understand tensions and challenges in growing and creating collective goods and to identify what works.
References
Geiger, S. (2021) Healthcare Activism, Marketization, and the Collective Good. In: Susi Geiger (ed.) Healthcare activisme. Markets, morals, & the collective good. Oxford, 1-27.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Heidrun Åm (NTNU)
Short abstract:
What would it take to administer new socio-technical resources, such as farmed salmon or health data, as collective goods? This presentation investigates what we can learn from Norwegian oil politics' financial public returns in regards of collective ownership and control.
Long abstract:
With the example of oil politics, Norway has an interesting history of administering a resource as collective good, financially speaking. With petroleum production eventually phasing out, both health data and farmed salmon are mentioned as part of a future bioeconomy that shall replace Norway’s oil economy. Public funding into biotechnology, medicine, or aquaculture, and public investments in health data infrastructures support this development. However, Mazzucato (2013) showed that states often fall short on cashing in on financial rewards from such public funding.
What would it take to administer new socio-technical resources, such as farmed salmon or health data, as collective goods? To answer this question, this presentation investigates what we can learn from Norwegian oil politics in terms of collectivizing goods. Obviously, there are serious environmental costs in oil extraction. However, I think there is something to learn in terms of thinking ownership and collective control that can help us imagine the governance of new sociotechnical resources beyond assetization. I argue that sociotechnical formations incentivizing collective goods do not only encompass governance and legal efforts, but as well as a politics of belonging which is both about constructing and contesting collectivities and collectiveness.
Mette N. Svendsen (University of Copenhagen) Olivia Spalletta (University of Copenhagen)
Short abstract:
In Denmark, genomic and health data from the national population are framed as collective resources for precision medicine. Based on ethnography , this paper discusses who and what belong in the collective when incentivizing population data for precision medicine in an age of ecological peril
Long abstract:
Precision medicine is a field of huge economic and political investments. In Denmark, genomic and health data from the national population are framed as collective resources for the development and realization of life-saving precision medicine for Danish patients. However, in political debates and everyday practices of precision medicine, there is no discussion of present and future environmental collapse, despite the field’s huge energy consumption. To us, this absence raises questions about the collective good in precision medicine. Whose good is imagined and worth attending to? What role does and should ecological peril play in producing and mobilizing data resources for human health? Based on ethnography from Denmark, we discuss who and what belong in the collective when incentivizing genomic and health data for precision medicine.
Karoliina Snell (University of Helsinki) Heta Tarkkala (University of Helsinki)
Short abstract:
The presentation deals with multiple goods embedded in the vision and purposes of newly founded Finnish national quality registers. Particularly, we focus on the conflict between several imagined purposes and the need to minimize the data set and the efforts to record the data.
Long abstract:
The goal of national quality registers in Finland is to evaluate and benchmark quality of health care and develop the quality through systematic follow-up. Quality register data are visioned to be used by many actors and serve many goods: doctors in peer development; knowledge management in local, regional and national level; medical research and development; and in transparent communication about services to citizens. In this presentation, we address these multiple goods embedded in the vision and purposes of newly founded Finnish national quality registers. Particularly, we focus on the conflict between several imagined purposes and the need to minimize the data set and the efforts to record the data. Minimization is a legal and technical requirement but also concerns the workload of doctors and nurses. In addition, it poses challenges to the ways data can be used as well as what and whose questions it can answer.
Laurène Assailly (Université de Strasbourg)
Short abstract:
This paper studies the conflict toward health data definition as a collective good in France – “heritage” or commons - linked to distinct forms of data government. It analyses two rival sociotechnical arrangements, entailing different allocation of power among data producers, users and the State.
Long abstract:
This paper explores the controversial establishment of health data as a public good, although data sharing is widely accepted as desirable for medical research and innovation. It focuses on the mobilization against a national program for health data centralization.
Since 2019, the French government Health Data Hub project faces mobilisation from medical and IT workers. This paper discuss how this conflict relates to a controversy about health data definition as a collective good, and how and by whom data should be governed. It analyses two rival sociotechnical arrangements, entailing different allocation of power among data producers, users and the State. I start by looking at the national project. It aims to encourage exploitation of national health data “heritage” as an asset for medical innovation. The sociotechnical imaginary it mobilises naturalises data as a resource and is blind to data materiality. Then, I look at the opponents who advocates for data as health commons, within Free Software and communalism of science ideals. They deny data as a resource, claiming it as the product of their work. Finally, in an ecological approach, I show data materiality currently allows producers to control it, which is key to their medical and research strategies. They feel threatened by innovation policies menacing to detach data from them.
This paper is based on a PhD research about hospital data work and the government of health data; at the intersection of STS, sociology of medicine and political science.
Dan Santos (Australian National University) Edilene Lopes McInnes (The University of Adelaide) Joan Leach (ANU) Rachel Ankeny (Wageningen University) Dianne Nicol (University of Tasmania) Mengqi Hu Christine Wells (University of Melbourne) Rebekah Harms
Short abstract:
Commons enable, incentivize or require sharing and collaboration. We explore efforts to establish a data commons through an Australian stem cell registry. We explore the constructedness of resources, and the tensions in establishing collective goods around distinct but interrelated resources.
Long abstract:
Scientific research depends on sharing resources and communication and collaboration between a range of interested parties. Many of these interactions are informal, but there are also more formal arrangements and infrastructures to enable, incentivize or require sharing and collaboration in particular ways. Commons are one such arrangement, e.g., genomic commons (Contreras 2014), mouse commons (Bubela et al. 2017), biomedical commons (Bollinger et al. 2019). Key issues include the provision, governance, ownership, and access to commoned resources. Existing cases, and commons theory more generally, are useful for understanding other initiatives to establish collective goods in scientific research.
We explore efforts to establish a registry for the Australian stem cell research community. A registry is a centralized database containing information about the stem cell lines generated by researchers (but not the lines themselves) to foster transparency, visibility and efficiency in the use of these resources. Drawing on findings from a collaborative research project investigating ‘openness’ in stem cell research, we analyze a subset of insights from interviews with researchers about their experiences, attitudes and suggestions for establishing a stem cell registry, and how these compare to other options (e.g. banks, where cells would also be centrally maintained). Conceptually, our analysis builds on commons theories (Ostrom and Hess 2006) and focusses on two intertwined dynamics: 1) the contingent construction of resources, and the challenges in shifting resources from individual to collective goods, and 2) the tensions in establishing collective goods around two distinct, but interrelated, resources (i.e. stem cell lines, and associated data).