Short Abstract

What happens to the promissory utopias of data-driven healthcare “in the meantime”? This panel reinvigorates STS approaches to healthcare data and temporality through Masquelier & Durham’s anthropology of the possible, tracing how waiting, delay, reframing and repair shape care.

Description

In contemporary healthcare, data are routinely invoked as instruments for prediction, control and revolutionary transformation, promising more personalised, efficient, and evidence-based care. Yet between the aspirational and the actual lies what Masquelier and Durham (2023) call 'the meantime': the indeterminate, affective, and open-ended space in which possible futures are continually negotiated. Drawing on their invitation to an anthropology of the possible, this panel reinvigorates the ways STS engages empirically with data practices that are neither fully realised nor entirely speculative.

Drawing on empirical research in social studies of medicine, healthcare and clinical data infrastructures, we explore the forms of waiting, adjustment, and improvisation characterising everyday work with data. These ‘meantime practices’ include the crafting of incomplete datasets, the maintenance of fragile and sometimes fictional interoperability, and the affective labours of care that make such systems function. Rather than treating data as stable intermediaries or precursors to predictive futures, we approach them as sites where the possible is continually refigured — through moments of suspension, hesitation, and repair.

Bringing Masquelier and Durham’s anthropology of the possible into dialogue with feminist STS and social studies of data, we explore the conceptual and methodological openings for studying healthcare data as a terrain of ongoing possibility. Such an approach invites us to notice not only what data are promised to deliver, but also what they hold open — in the meantime — about how futures of health, care, and evidence might be made otherwise. We invite papers that consider data practices and care in ‘the meantime’, engaging questions such as:

- What novel modes of attention become possible when ‘the meantime’ of data practices is our focus?

- What sorts of ‘meantimes’, of different temporalities, exist among data practices?

- How do ‘data meantimes’ shape our understandings of the past, and possibilities for the future of care?

This Traditional Open Panel has 1 pending paper proposal.
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