Short Abstract

This panel examines the convergence of biomedicine and surveillance through existing and newly emerging biomedical technologies, particularly biometrics. We examine the sociotechnical impacts of these technologies on medical values and norms, infrastructures and experiences of health and well-being

Description

Driven by the continued datafication and automation, biometric data have become central to advancements in personalized medicine and healthcare. Yet, biometrics embody and expand the epistemologies and techniques of surveillance and security regimes. This panel explores the renewed nexus between medicine and surveillance, reconfigured by advances in biometrics and AI. Biometric surveillance has been integral to both administrative and clinical procedures, from immigration health screenings to regulating access to care. Emerging biometric technologies—such as skin screening, facial recognition, emotion detection, or voice analysis—are blurring the boundaries between diagnostics, identification, prediction, and surveillance. They are reshaping the norms and values through which bodies are diagnosed and made in/eligible, and how populations are governed and controlled.

Although biometric medicine has far-reaching consequences, it has remained relatively little-discussed. It promises to account for multiple understandings of health, potentially reconfiguring traditional domains of authority and power. Its techniques transform the frameworks through which health risks are produced and monitored, treatment eligibility is determined, or medical interventions are conceived. New medical capital and data assets for institutions and commercial actors are being created. At the same time, deploying biometric techniques often deepens epistemic, economic, and historical injustices and structures of discrimination and oppression.

We propose renewing a critical focus on the entanglements of medicine and surveillance. We welcome contributions with methodological and analytical perspectives on biometrics/biodata in medicine and health, and how these domains are reconfigured through datafication and algorithmic processing.

Contributions may address a range of themes including

- sociotechnical visions and promises underpinning medical biometrics;

- historical and colonial legacies shaping biometric assemblages and the construction of (non-)humanity and able-bodiedness;

- how individuals are enrolled in, adapt to, or resist emerging forms of health surveillance;

- issues around privacy, autonomy, and consent in medical biometrics;

- reinforcing or challenging inequalities, discrimination, or bias, and the shifting responsibilities and accountabilities.

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