[Air-L] Call for abstracts "Disentangling AI and Health/Healthcare: imaginaries, narratives, values"

[Locatelli Elisabetta (elisabetta.locatelli)]

Dear all,

apologies for cross-posting.
If you are interested in health and AI, narratives and imaginaries please consider to submit your paper to the panel "Disentangling AI and Health/Healthcare: imaginaries, narratives, values" of which I'm convenor within the 10th STS Italia Conference “Technoscience for Good: Designing, Caring and Reconfiguring” (Politecnico di Milano, 11-13 June 2025 in Milan (Italy). Deadline: 3rd February.

Health and healthcare are among the fields with the most promising and innovative applications of AI technologies, for example for accelerating diagnoses; identifying rare diseases; interpreting diagnostic images; improving communication (i.e. if added in devices for disabled people or for dissemination purposes). Besides the hype and the enthusiasm, a deep understanding is needed to unfold the hidden values and risks of AI for health and healthcare. Relevant issues include how fundamental concepts are conceived (such as health, healthcare, care, person, life, death, illness, efficiency); who should lead AI innovation; who is in charge to define boundaries and limits regarding the use of data (i.e. data collection and storage, avoiding biases, AI training). Beside the study of the technology per se, previous STS research demonstrated the importance of imaginaries and visions in shaping technology outcomes. Decoding such imaginaries would be helpful to better understand the issues above sketched out and direct the AI development for health and healthcare towards the common good. Despite the number of investigations on AI imaginaries, the association between AI and health/healthcare is still underinvestigated, as Hoff highlights in his analysis of how governments construe sociotechnical imaginaries of AI and healthcare services. Beside governments, several other actors contribute to build this imaginary, such as innovators, companies, news media, institutional documents, popular discourses. The panel proposes, thus, to put together different perspectives on the intersection between health/healthcare and AI, to investigate its technological, cultural, and sociological underpinnings, bias, and risks.

Submissions of theoretical or empirical research regarding, but not limited to, the following topics are welcome:
•  National and/or international imaginaries on AI and health/healthcare;
•  Media (news media, social media…) imaginaries of AI and health/healthcare;
•  Imaginaries of AI and health/healthcare from governments, public institutions, physicians, healthcare professionals, scientists, patients, patient’s organizations, common citizens, etc.;
•  AI for health/healthcare communication;
•  STS analysis of design and implementation of AI for health/healthcare.

Here are more information about the submission process and the conference https://stsitalia.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/59.Disentangling-AI-and-Health_Healthcare_-imaginaries-narratives-values-ID_99.pdf

Please feel free to contact me if you need any further information

Kind regards

Elisabetta Locatelli, Ph.D.

elisabetta.locatelli at unicatt.it<mailto:elisabetta.locatelli at unicatt.it>

Latest publications: Locatelli, E. (2023). “New Trends in Health Communication: Entanglements between Social Media, TV Series, Psychology, and Mental Health.” In Investigating Medical Drama TV Series: Approaches and Perspectives. 14th Media Mutations International Conference, edited by Stefania Antonioni and Marta Rocchi, 1st ed. Media Mutations Publishing. https://doi.org/10.21428/93b7ef64.4b0fa03f; Locatelli, E., Lovari, A., Righetti, N. (2024). "When Public Health Communication Intertwines with Social Media Logic. A Focus on the Early Phase of COVID-19 Pandemic in Italy", Comunicazioni Sociali, https://dx.doi.org/10.26350/001200_000198.

[http://static.unicatt.it/ext-portale/5xmille_firma_mail_2023.jpg] <https://www.unicatt.it/uc/5xmille>