Emergent Technologies in Biomedicine and Healthcare: Boundaries, Tensions, and Possibilities - II

Abstract

Emergent technologies and the implementation of new and innovative models, measures, and systems present rich sites for STS scholars to follow, understand, and intervene on technologies in the making (Brey 2012; Guston 2014). As new technologies are implemented in existing biomedical research and healthcare infrastructures, they carry with them great promise to disrupt standards and routine practice as well as improve our understanding of health, illness, and the human body. Yet as STS scholars have shown, technologies often reproduce and deepen existing disparities (Eubanks 2018; Lee 2003; Murphy 2006; Noble 2018; Sankar et al. 2004; Shostak 2013). Studying how emergent technologies and systems are designed, regenerated, mechanized, commercialized, and integrated offers a window to understand the trajectory of technologies and the racialized, classed, and gendered logic of systems with which they interact. This panel invites empirical contributions that explore how emergent technologies and platforms are constructed, implemented, and standardized in biomedical and healthcare settings. In alignment with this year's theme, papers should offer innovative approaches and generate new ways of reframing the promises of innovation. We particularly are interested in papers that examine the implications of emergent technologies and systems for inequality and health justice.

Chair

• Melanie Jeske, University of California, San Francisco

Individual Presentations

• Biomedical Innovations in Cancer Care and the Increasing of Health Inequalities in Brazil - Jorge Alberto Bernstein Iriart, Instittuto de Saúde Coletiva da Universidade Federal da Bahia

• Pixelated Therapy: Patient and Provider Experiences and Expectations within a Digitally-Conducted Therapeutic Encounter - Jeff Nicklas, University of California, San Francisco

• "Just Leave the Patient as a Number": Algorithmic Renderings of Cancer - Tiên-Dung Hà, Stanford University

• ICU, Interrupted: Critical Care and Critical Technology in Argentina - Livia Garofalo, Northwestern University

• Enacting Treatment: The Case of Chronic Kidney Disease and Dialysis - Samantha A. Whitman, Arizona State University; Kathleen H Pine, Arizona State University; Kasey Boehmer, Mayo Clinic; Nataly Espinoza, Mayo Clinic; Paige Organick, Mayo Clinic; Anjali Thota, Mayo Clinic; Bjoerg Thorsteinsdottir, Mayo Clinic; Aditya Pawar, Mayo Clinic; Victor M. Montori, Mayo Clinic

Session Organizer

• Rosalie Winslow, University of California, San Francisco