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In recent years, health-related data and processes of datafication have received extensive academic attention. Scholarly discussions have highlighted either potential promises of datafication, such as predicting and mitigating salient challenges of col- lective and individual health, or perils, such as surveilling more and more aspects of our intimate lives.

Bringing together contributions from various disciplines, this symposium explores the intersection of datafication and expertise in the health sector. When human life and health are increasingly transformed into data, and different kinds of values are generated from these data, in what ways do these processes restructure knowledge relationships and affect power dynamics in medicine, science, and society more broadly? Comprising detailed empirical research in science and technology studies, anthropology, and history this symposium explores how the datafication of health possibly redefines expertise in health research, healthcare, clinical encounters as well as in the daily lives of patients and their relatives. In what ways do processes of datafication redistribute authority between various actors? What are the emerging modes of expertise related to the growing field of health-related digital data? How are relations between different forms of expertise reworked, and what forms of care do they engender? The symposium also discusses in what manner novel distributions and reconfigurations of expertise maintain long-standing social divides or possibly create new inequalities. In what ways do they build on, reinforce, or create inequalities in various relational constellations and on different scales – e.g. between patients and physicians, between medical professionals and scientists, between the public and the private sector, between the global north and the global south? Finally, the symposium investigates how these epistemic dimensions give raise to moral complexities related to the datafication of health. For example, it asks how questions of trust, responsibility and accountability are implicated in novel distributions and reconfigurations of expertise.

Sessions on:
‘Infrastructural Works’, ‘Moral Complexities’, and ‘Epistemic Encounters’

Place:
University of St. Gallen, Room 09-012, Library Building

Information and registration:
Registration is required to attend the event on site. A Zoom link will alsobe provided on demand.
For online and in-person registration, please contact: christina.ihasz-riedener(at)unisg.ch