- Convenor:
-
Matteo Tarantino
(Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore di Milano)
Send message to Convenor
- Chair:
-
Matteo Tarantino
(Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore di Milano)
- Format:
- Traditional Open Panel
Short Abstract
This panel explores care practices at the intersection of health and environmental data across multiple scales. We examine how data infrastructures embed care as material practice mediated by sociotechnical apparatuses. Topics include data justice;exclusion/inclusion; communication as care practice.
Description
This panel proposes a critical exploration of practices and technologies that emerge at the intersection between health and environmental data, interrogating how technologies of knowledge and communication operate across scales from the individual body to planetary ecosystems. The increasing datafication of health and the environment entails an examination of which data are collected, who cares for these data, how they are communicated, and what forms of responsibility and attention they require. The proliferation of data infrastructures connecting public health and environmental monitoring network raises questions about the care practices embedded within these technologies. Following the tradition of feminist technoscience studies care emerges not only as a moral disposition, but as a situated, material practice that runs through such entities as wearable sensors, epidemiological registries, algorithmic platforms, and environmental monitoring networks.
We invite empirical contributions, methodological reflections, and conceptual interventions that address the "matters of care" in these technoscientific spaces, where the maintenance and repair of our worlds (from bodies to communities to environments) requires continuous attention and political commitment. Potential topics include:
1) Access to technologies of care; data practices reproduce or challenge existing inequalities in health and environmental vulnerability;
2) Forms of exclusion, extraction, or violence perpetrated in the name of care; conversely, how to move towards more just and inclusive approaches to health and environmental data governance.
3) Communication as a care practice, for instance the translation of environmental and health data into actionable knowledge; trust-building with vulnerable communities, the roles of visualization, storytelling, and participatory methods.
Accepted papers
Paper short abstract
Conceptualizing Instagram as a socio-technical infrastructure and communication as a practice of care, this paper examines how healthcare professionals in early childhood nutrition act as mediators of health knowledge, linking it into everyday practices and public health concerns.
Paper long abstract
Nutrition has become an increasingly relevant issue for public health. Malnutrition, in fact, concerns both those who lack access to sufficient food and those who consume excessive amounts of it. Italy is among the European countries with the highest rates of childhood obesity, a situation that has important implications for the sustainability of the healthcare system and the prevalence of chronic diseases. Influencing nutritional practices becomes relevant across scales, from the individual to the collective, and may contribute to mitigating the social and economic impacts of malnutrition. In this context, digital communication may play a key role in shaping awareness and everyday nutritional habits because, in recent years, digital platforms have become key sites for health communication, functioning as socio-technical infrastructures through which health knowledge is produced and circulated. However, to be effective, communication must not only be evidence-based but also translated into everyday practices.
Drawing on platform studies and feminist technoscience studies, this paper conceptualizes communication as a situated practice of care that contributes to raising awareness about nutrition and healthy habits. It examines the role of expert health influencers in early childhood nutrition. The study analyzes a corpus of posts published on Instagram by 48 healthcare professionals between July 2021 and July 2024, combining discourse and content analysis. The findings show that they act as mediators of health knowledge, translating scientific evidence and public health guidelines into actionable practices while connecting everyday experiences with broader public health concerns, thereby contributing to the enactment of care through platform-based communication.
Paper short abstract
Sleep has become part of the mediatic agenda in Uruguay in the last decades, often relying on data provided by scientific research to support their claims. Drawing on newspaper articles and radio and tv shows from 2003 to 2024, we analyze the process of science communication about sleep in Uruguay.
Paper long abstract
Sleep has become part of the mediatic agenda in Uruguay in the last decades, often relying on data provided by scientific research to support their claims. In our study, we analyzed the written press published from 2003 to 2024 and audiovisual material broadcast on open radio and television in Uruguay from 2015 to 2024. In this paper, we analyze the process of science communication to provide insight into the discourses being reinforced around sleep. We focus on a few illustrative examples from the Uruguayan press and compare them to the referenced research papers. We observe that in the process of science communication, scientific data, journalists, expert sources, and audiences come together to co-construct narratives about good and bad sleep while also contributing to the characterization of Uruguayans' sleep. Such a process leads to notions of what a healthy sleep is according to medicine, what is considered a deviation, and problems and strategies disseminated by the media to approach and prevent related health issues. In this sense, the biomedical perspective prevails over social, cultural and labor factors that may influence sleep and rest. We also note that while the audiovisual pieces reference fewer and local research sources, the Uruguayan written press often reproduces notes provided by larger global media conglomerates, therefore introducing foreign academic references to Uruguayans and globalizing claims about sleep. This way, we aim at contributing to the discussion about science communication processes, which while problematic, is also important to attract visibility and increase the impact of academic research.
Paper short abstract
Interviews with 25 Chinese AI mental-health developers show how “care” is translated into scalable data practices. Distress becomes measurable “pain points,” and success shifts to retention. Platform infrastructures embed care while redistributing exclusion and responsibility.
Paper long abstract
Across China’s rapidly expanding AI mental-health sector, “care” is increasingly mediated through data infrastructures rather than professional institutions. Drawing on 25 in-depth interviews with developers (founders, product managers, engineers, and researchers) and analysis of product documentation, this paper examines how developers translate care into forms compatible with platform scaling. I show, first, how care is redefined as a user’s subjective “feeling cared for,” which then demands an objective trigger that can be designed, logged, and optimised. In practice, developers name this trigger “pain points”: user distress is rendered into stable categories that can enter roadmaps and A/B tests, allowing care to be embedded materially in interaction scripts and metric dashboards rather than in situated tinkering. Second, I trace how success is re-measured when care must scale. A clinical “arch” trajectory—users improving and leaving—becomes commercially non-viable, while a “wave” model reframes care as cyclical return, positioning AI as an always-available infrastructure users repeatedly draw on. This shift makes relational attention measurable (retention, engagement) and thus governable, but it also reorganises exclusion and responsibility: forms of suffering that do not map neatly onto shared pain points, or that require moment-by-moment adjustment, are structurally sidelined; users are expected to self-manage within preconfigured pathways. By foregrounding translation as a communicative care practice—turning lived vulnerability into actionable data—I argue that algorithmic care infrastructures perform a politics of care and data justice: they distribute who can be cared for, what counts as care, and where obligations land unevenly, across individual, organisational, regulatory, and societal scales
Paper short abstract
Urban environmental communication involves conflicting temporalities between stakeholders involved. Drawing on the Caffaro case, this study conceptualizes temporal gears of care to show how communication is negotiated through temporal boundary objects to translate data into inclusive governance.
Paper long abstract
In complex urban contexts, “matters of care” emerge in the co-construction of environmental communication between institutions and citizens. This process should harmonize diverse perceptions of sustainability with the temporal rhythms of political cycles, bureaucratic procedures, media agendas and civic expectations (Lammers & Barbour, 2006b; 2011; Moscovici, 1981). Care thus becomes a negotiated practice, mediating among competing representations of sustainability and enabling the articulation of shared – though temporarily provisional – forms of communication.
While institutional discourse frames care primarily as citizen engagement, an ethnographic perspective reveals how communication flows are shaped by structural asynchronies (Jurin, 2010; Howlett, 2020). Environmental crises demand rapid responses, yet institutional timelines frequently lag behind ecological urgency and consensus-building processes (Istrate, 2022) generating temporal friction that undermines effectiveness of communication.
This contribution draws on the Caffaro case remediation (Brescia), a contested project spanning over two decades, and on the Caffaro Observatory, established in 2021 as a participatory forum. Since 2022, the Observatory has worked to develop a Communication Protocol integrating diverse actor perspectives. Using qualitative methods – participant observation, thematic analysis and interviews – the research analyzes care ias temporal compromise between stakeholders in translating technical information.
Findings conceptualize communication as a system of “temporal gears” generating friction in data care and sharing. The translation of environmental data into actionable knowledge occurs through boundary objects – such as communication bulletins – that function as negotiated compromises of care. The resulting Communication Protocol exemplifies an attempt to manage temporal asynchrony, maintaining intelligibility and trust.
Paper short abstract
STS highlights that the planetary scale of climate models is a local vision. I empirically explore “the visions of locality” to examine which versions of locality are at stake in data-based imaginings of climate futures, which alternatives are proscribed, and how it can be otherwise.
Paper long abstract
STS has drawn attention to the importance of “provincializing” the climate and highlighted the “locality of vision” in the planetary scale that climate models have enabled (as opposed to the universalist, “from nowhere” vision they often imply). However, climatologists, environmental scientists, and epidemiologists are increasingly working to make data a common ground for climate adaptation, a “going local” approach where the promise is to reduce the effects of climate change on specific places and communities. For epidemiologists, addressing “the next pandemic” or the rise in infectious disease cases driven by climate change is a global urgency. For climatologists and environmental scientists, more fine-grained data is important for determining how extreme weather events affect local communities and territories.
In this paper, I suggest that the trend towards “going local” in climate adaptation raises new questions for STS scholarship, particularly regarding the competing visions of locality and the planetary that emerge in the practices of “harmonizing” data and “downscaling” models. I do so by presenting empirical examples from a project that seeks to integrate environmental, climate, and health data in Latin America to support climate adaptation in health, paying attention to the forms of knowledge, community participation, and care that they enable and foreclose. I propose ‘visions of locality’ as a new avenue for STS research to examine which versions of locality are at stake when the future of climate governance is imagined based on data, which alternatives are proscribed, and how it can be otherwise.
Paper short abstract
Based on preliminary fieldwork and regulatory analysis, this paper shows how law, atmospheric data, and communication practices on air pollution constitute which 'airs' become governable, revealing ontological work that remains invisible yet politically relevant for whose bodies receive care.
Paper long abstract
Following Mol's insight that medical objects are ontologically multiple–enacted differently across distinct practices rather than variously represented–this paper examines how air pollution is enacted as multiple objects across EU governance and environmental regulation, and how legal and communicative practices articulate, challenge, or stabilize the boundaries between these enactments. EU regulation, from Air Quality Directives (2008, 2024), emphasizing health-based limits, to Industrial Emissions Directive (2010, 2024), which governs facility controls, does not produce a singular "air pollution" but enacts ontologically distinct atmospheric objects through divergent metrics, pollutant prioritizations, and health-impact narratives.
These ontological differences are amplified through public communication: PM2.5, PM10 dominate health messaging with mortality estimates and Air Quality Index alerts, rendering pollution visible as bodily threat requiring behavioral response; nitrogen dioxide and ozone appear in regulatory compliance reports but remain communicatively marginal despite significant health burdens; while acid rain, historically central to environmental mobilization, has nearly disappeared from public discourse. Different pollutants thus inhabit different ontological-communicative registers: some enacted as health crises also by citizens action, others as technical regulatory parameters, still others as historical problems deemed "solved".
These multiplicities become significant when citizens mobilize data in strategic litigation challenging compliance. Courts must adjudicate between regulatory ontologies (threshold exceedance), epidemiological ontologies (attributable mortality), and experiential ontologies (lived exposure, embodied suffering). This paper argues that attending to how law, atmospheric data and communication practices constitute which "airs" and whose exposures become governable reveals the ontological work that remains largely invisible yet politically consequential for whose bodies and communities receive care.
Paper short abstract
Indoor air quality (IAQ) critically affects health and cognition yet remains marginal in European policy. This study analyzes four tech firms’AQ devices and narratives, revealing a neoliberal framing: IAQ reduced to PM metrics, tied to productivity and consumer choice, not public health or justice.
Paper long abstract
Indoor air quality (IAQ) represents a critical public health dimension, with mounting evidence demonstrating its profound effects on overall well-being, respiratory health and cognitive functions. However, IAQ remains relatively underrepresented in both public discourse and policy agendas, particularly in the European context. This presentation presents results of an analysis that deals with the problem under two interrelated strands. On the one hand, it examines the technological devices sold by four companies in terms of technological choices (choice of sensors and monitoring strategies, data formats, outputs etc.) and how they reflect a uniform representation of air pollution (reduced, for instance, to PM particles). Secondly, the analysis examines the discourses through which those companies frame the IAQ problem, identifying dominant narrative patterns and rhetorical strategies. Results from the two intertwined strands indicate a dominant "neoliberal approach" wherein IAQ is discursively constructed primarily as a workplace productivity issue rather than a broader public health or environmental justice concern, reducing air quality to one dimension (PM concentrations), emphasising individual consumer choice and market-based solutions and framing improved air quality as a competitive advantage in attracting talent and enhancing worker efficiency rather than as a fundamental right or collective responsibility.