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Paper short abstract:

We use creative methods (photo-elicitation and zine-making) to explore type 1 diabetics’ relationships to their medical devices, and more importantly, to their visions of liberated futures that transcend biometric tests and data-centric measures of health.

Paper long abstract:

Type 1 diabetics are an intensively surveilled category of people, hooked into vast data systems and technological infrastructures in the name of managing their health. This surveillance, framed as benevolent and rendered as a form of care, is anchored in the idea that technology brings freedom from the constraints of sickness. Yet, people with type 1, who live constantly connected to biometric technology in order to survive, offer important alternative perspectives on freedom, health, and technology that can provide insight to the fields of surveillance studies and science and technology studies. In this session, Beutin and Biruk discuss using photo-elicitation interviewing and zine-making methods to document how sick people envision and enact fabulous lives beyond the data, technologies, and metrics that often govern our bodies, minds, and health management. By focusing on type 1 diabetics, the larger project aims to build an archive of now-obsolete diabetic technologies that did not work as promised. In so doing, it offers a critical and historicized material reflection on the dominant discourse that technology is liberating and will either fix or save sick people from ourselves, when in fact, it is often our tinkering, intuition, and embodied knowledge that makes the technology livable in spite of its pitfalls. During our presentation, we will engage in a group photo-elicitation exercise and a “scribble-rant” zine-making exercise, where audience members will get to try out the methods of this project, share insights that arise, and comment on the potential and limitations of our creative methodology.