Paper long abstract:

As life increasingly becomes a strategic enterprise, both health and living with a chronic condition seem to be something that has to be individually produced and managed in everyday life. Obviously this sociological diagnosis links to the fact that people make more and more use of technical equipment in order to quantify and monitor their body on a regular basis. Collecting health data as a way of gaining self knowledge is the main concept of "quantified self". Similar practices of constructing bodily realities through numbers also occur in medical contexts. The self-referring everyday activity of a diabetic is generally accompanied by technology-based body monitoring. Illness and health become a task to be performed self-responsibly not only by the "ill" but also by the "healthy" person. This has consequences far beyond the individual level, for example if the "data-body" could display features of employability or collecting self tracking data becomes the scale of incentives.

Many scholars draw on Foucault`s work to explain Quantified Self or personalized medicine as particular mode of mundane gouvernmentality. One weakness of this framework is its focus individual decisions being determined by neoliberal rationalities. Thus, the framework can neither cquestion the ways in which actors involved in measuring are themselves sensitive to political strategies and power asymmetries, nor does it cover the scope for action as perceived by actors themselves. Drawing on ethnographical interviews with actors of Quantified Self movement and people with diabetes disease I would like to question this point.