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Paper short abstract

This paper explores emerging facial recognition applications in biomedicine to trace the making of contemporary imaginaries of medical faces, together with their associated hopes and promises for producing new diagnostic knowledge.

Paper long abstract

While facial recognition technologies have increasingly become framed as revolutionary tools for unlocking new forms of diagnostic knowledge, their assumptions and promises are rooted in historical contexts. Drawing on Fleck’s notion of pre-scientific ideas the paper traces how longstanding myths and beliefs around the face become newly embedded into medicine and healthcare contexts through surveillance and machine learning application. Empirically, the analysis focuses on recent examples of machine-learning algorithms that are developed, trained, and tested to identify facial traits and automatically match patient faces to cases of genetic disorder. The paper traces how these pre-scientific concepts and their associated medical claims have promoted the face as a privileged source of reading and classifying physical and mental conditions of a individual subject. It further explores how these ideas do not remain static when integrated into contemporary scientific frameworks. Instead, the study shows how algorithmic processes, through the automated coding and analysis of medical faces, produce new meanings and practices within diagnostic and healthcare settings. The paper thereby argues that novel imaginaries of the medical face are designed to promote emerging biomedical practices around facial recognition, narrating facial characteristics as seemingly objective, biological markers of disease. By analyzing medical faces, I furthermore illustrate the blurring of boundaries between diagnostics, identification, prediction, and surveillance medicine. These shifts reshape the norms and values through which bodies are diagnosed and made legible, health risks are produced and monitored, treatment eligibility is determined, and medical interventions are conceived.