Paper short abstract:

This paper draws on feminist and decolonial approaches to data to reflect on how the data generated in the context of testing practices in Quebec/Canada dedicated to preventing diet-associated health risks contribute to reinforcing power relationships that ultimately affect unevenly people’s health.

Paper long abstract:

This paper starts with presenting the broad lines of a research project where I compare testing practices in Quebec & Canada dedicated to preventing and controlling chronic conditions associated with food ingestion, such as diabetes, with others dedicated to preventing health conditions associated with the ingestion of pesticides and contaminants. I approach these practices as constitutive of the apparatus dedicated to preventing long-term diet-associated health risks and argue that it not only integrates different approaches to risk and ways of caring for health and bodies, but also that it orients where the onus of responsibility lies when it comes to managing or preventing diet-associated health conditions, playing a role in invisibilizing the environmental factors in disease causation and reinforcing the individualization of health (responsibility) rather than its collectivization. Building on this, I draw on feminist and decolonial approaches to data to reflect on how the data generated in the context of these testing practices (the data themselves, but also the ways in which they are produced and mobilized) contribute to reinforcing existent power relationships that ultimately affect unevenly people’s health.