Click the star to add/remove an item to/from your individual schedule.
You need to be logged in to avail of this functionality,
and to see the links to virtual rooms.
Log in
- Convenors:
-
Dominique Somda
(HUMA-UCT)
Azza Mustafa Ahmed (HUMA - Institute for Humanities in Africa, UCT)
Send message to Convenors
- Format:
- Panel
- Sessions:
- Monday 6 June, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This panel focuses on AI in healthcare in the context of the Global South. We want to invite contributors to explore data collections by and for AI powered machines in hospitals and beyond, and the expected and unforeseen consequences of their extraction.
Long Abstract:
This panel focuses on AI in healthcare in the context of the Global South. We want to invite contributors to explore data collections by and for AI powered machines in hospitals and beyond. We aim to examine the nature of the data involved (including their social and scientific constructions as data), and the expected and unforeseen consequences of their extraction.
Middle- and low-income countries are not only more subjected to inequalities and less likely to benefit from AI, tailored to their specific local needs - they are also less likely to benefit from data protection laws and regulations. Risks of data mining and data looting in the Global South are not dissimilar to those weighing on economically and politically disenfranchised populations in the Global North. We will comparatively explore the geopolitics of data exploitation.
We wish to critically reflect on the various iterations, understandings, and implementations of the rights included in data ethics discourses and human rights instruments (i.e., the rights to privacy, transparency, ownership, consent, openness). Anthropologists can provide invaluable context to unveil the various constraints that individuals and stakeholders face - some of which undermine the processes designed to protect rights to data protection in healthcare systems.
Finally, we will consider the coloniality of data and the hegemony of representation and quantification of populations in global health.The technological innovations and capitalist ventures we are exploring in the panel exist in continuity with the structures and practices that preceded them, as legacies of the missionary and colonial healthcare systems.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Monday 6 June, 2022, -Milena Geisa dos Santos Martins (Universidade Federal Rural do Rio de Janeiro - UFRRJ)
Paper short abstract:
There are more than 10.000 apps for mental health were available. In Brazil,Cíngulo Guided Therapy has more than 1 million downloads. I chose it as my research object and I intend to identify: why people have started to use digital therapy for mental care and discover what there are behind its uses.
Paper long abstract:
Due to the high number of people affected by depression around the globe, since 2017, more than 10.000 apps for mental health were available to download through smartphones (TOROUS, ROBERTS; 2017). In Brazil, according to PlayStore data, there is one with more than 1 million downloads, called Cíngulo Guided Therapy. So, I chose it as my research object. About it, I intend to: 1) identify why people have started to use digital therapy for mental care; 2) discover what there are behind its uses. I suppose that cyberculture is the reason people accept and use new technologies, offered by the market, without thinking about consequences. Based on habitus conception (BOURDIEU, 1998), I defend that cultural practices, under the course of time, are understood as a natural action. Maybe, users do not reflect on their uses because transformations occur in the moral and practical spheres at the same time (MILLER; HORST, 2015). By the way, while they expect to get good services, most parts of them do not know that they are being watched when using the app. So, if “technologies are a product of a society and its culture” (LEVY; 1999, p. 22), I suspect that this Mhealth may be another product of capitalist society, aimed at surveillance capitalism (ZUBOFF; 2015). Therefore, I argue that it needs to be investigated and problematized in order to foster discussions relevant to Anthropology, that there are may still be covered by the fog of constant technological changes.
Azza Mustafa Ahmed (HUMA - Institute for Humanities in Africa, UCT)
Paper short abstract:
This paper is about how healthcare provision in Rwanda is transforming upon the introduction of data driven technologies. It is focusing on digitalising Rwanda’s Community-Based Health Insurance (CBHI) by looking at how data and its technologies are taken up, enacted, and reproduced.
Paper long abstract:
This paper is about how healthcare provision in Rwanda is completely transforming upon the introduction of data driven technologies. It is focusing on digitalising Rwanda’s Community-Based Health Insurance (CBHI) by looking at how data and its technologies -in this context- are taken up, enacted, and reproduced. Healthcare systems in the Global South are rapidly changing due to the introduction of data driven technologies. For instance, the digitalisation of medical health records; the provision of primary healthcare through ‘telemedicine’ and mobile phones; or the general usage of mobile apps and tracking devices to monitor chronic health conditions and/or for the general wellbeing. Scientists from different fields, such as social sciences, the humanities, science and technology, and data sciences have recently developed interest in studying the datafication of healthcare systems. However, most of the research is focusing on the Global North (Minna Ruckenstein and Natasha Schull, 2016). In the African contexts, there has been a handful of studies that focus on the introduction of the data driven technologies and how it transformed the provision of healthcare, with the focus on how people experience these technologies, how healthcare systems are transforming, and what sort of policies, laws, and regulations composed to develop and govern such transformations. I will present an ethnographic case of how the CBHI subscribers pay premiums into a local health fund via an online platform known by Irembo. It is to offer insights on how actors remodel, reboot, and reproduce power structures through the datafication of healthcare.
Leah Junck (University of Cape Town)
Paper short abstract:
Conceptualisations of AI-driven healthcare ‘solutions’ in former colonial contexts are tied up with burlesque visions of a historical crossroads. These caricatured visions of development stand in sharp contrast to the nuanced ways in which data and coded technologies may be understood and embodied.
Paper long abstract:
This paper walks the reader through my thinking as I started engaging with the topic of artificial intelligence (AI) in healthcare in Mozambique. It illustrates that the public discourse on AI is distracting in that it tends to neglect epistemological questions of how AI is understood, how understandings frame immediate as well as more large-scaled interactions, and how these interactions reproduce power relations and structural violence. Setting out to research ‘AI in health’ had me reconnecting with my research on the Tinder dating app, and to the central question of how relational practices may form against the backdrop of hegemonic discourses, and imaginations of development, digitalisation and computation. Insights already gleaned from studying how coded dating technologies like Tinder are used to produce intimacy helped me contemplate how to think and speak about AI in a way that reveals more than it conceals. I argue that prominent ways of conceptualising data, digitisation processes and ‘AI solutions’ in healthcare and ‘postcolonial’ countries like Mozambique are also tied up with what I refer to as burlesque visions of a historical crossroads. These caricatured visions of development, reminiscent of colonial pasts, stand in sharp contrast to the nuanced ways in which data and coded technologies may be understood and embodied. AI in caregiving challenges how we think of core human values, like privacy, compassion, trust, and the very idea of care itself. It solicits substantial queries into what conceptions of care and well- being should and should not be encoded within these technologies.
Bianca Jansky (University of Augsburg, Germany) Ayush Shukla (Athena Institute, VU Amsterdam)
Paper short abstract:
In this presentation we analyse developers' norms and values in the context of data-driven healthcare development. Empirically we are focussing on in-depth interviews of developers in the Indian, German, and the US healthcare context.
Paper long abstract:
Data-driven healthcare technologies are increasingly being introduced into national healthcare policies. The development of these technologies is usually centered in particular geographical regions, most notably Silicon Valley in the USA. Another region associated with IT development is in India, with Bangalore, even referred to as the "Silicon Valley of India". We know from the rich Science and Technology Studies literature that technologies carry the ideas and assumptions of those who develop them, which is referred to as I-Methodology; in this presentation, we want to shift our gaze at the norms and values that guide stakeholders in the context of data-driven healthcare development. Empirically we are focussing on India, Germany, and the US, and the analysis aims to compare these different healthcare contexts. Recently there is a growing body of literature on how individuals are using these technologies in their everyday lives, and the ethical dimensions of the use are increasingly critically reflected upon in this context. However, little is known to date about how data-driven healthcare technology developers, designers, engineers, and other stakeholders in this field make ethical decisions, reflect on ethical challenges, or talk about the ethical dimensions of these new technologies. We ask how these different healthcare contexts shape developers' ethical decision-making processes and what implication this has for the developed technologies.