[Air-L] Call for Papers: Deceptive narratives and epistemic justice in technologies of care, 4S 2025

Mon Jan 6 07:43:17 PST 2025

Hello! I'm sharing a call for papers for the 4S conference - abstracts due Jan 31. Please share widely.

Call for Papers: Deceptive narratives and epistemic justice in technologies of care, 4S 2025, Seattle 3-7 September

Abstract due date: 31 January 2025

To submit, please go to the 4S submission page and select Open Panel #47
 https://www.4sonline.org/accepted_open_panels_seattle.php

Alison Powell and Philipp Seuferling invite you to join us in questioning the value placed on data, computational capacity or objectivity in health and care, broadly interpreted. Technologizing care can invoke deceptive, unhelpful stories of innovation: obsessions with efficiency have led to projects of “blitzscaling” the UK’s National Health Service, privatising genomic data in digital databases that go bankrupt (e.g. 23andMe), or datafying the provision of humanitarian care. The recasting of care into computational and algorithmic routines is often justified with stories of increased access, fairness or lower cost.

These benefits tend to be deceptively narrated in opposition to epistemic threats such as the erosion of clinical authority or the dismissal of lived experience in favour of objective evidence (Powell, 2024) – causing amnesia (Schneider, 2024). Such amnesia reverberates: historical capacities and knowledges are dismissed, leading to epistemic conflicts, commonly held knowledge appropriated, and principles of solidarity in care provision undermined.

We wonder:

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How do deceptive narratives around sociotechnical systems lead to epistemic injustices?
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How are designs of technologised care enmeshed with epistemic struggles – potentially unequal and unjust?
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How can care be thought and built otherwise – against, mindful of, or even embracing amnesia, and reclaiming solidarity?

This panel welcomes interventions on reverberations between information infrastructures, epistemic struggles, labour, care, materiality, history and liberation, such as:

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Sociomaterial studies of technologized infrastructures of care (such as automation of care work, electronic health records, AI diagnostics)
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Investigations of the consequences of infrastructural design for care data systems (such as private genomics databases or AI training data)
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Theorizations of legitimacy and epistemic justice in relation to technology and care

Submit 300 word abstracts by Jan 31 at: https://www.4sonline.org/accepted_open_panels_seattle.php

Any questions get in touch with Alison or Philipp
Alison Powell: a.powell at lse.ac.uk<mailto:a.powell at lse.ac.uk>
Philipp Seuferling: p.seuferling at lse.ac.uk<mailto:p.seuferling at lse.ac.uk>

Dr Alison Powell

Associate Professor and Director of MSc in Data & Society

Department of Media and Communications

London School of Economics and Political Science