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Session Submission Summary

Interrogating Innovation in Global Digital Mental Health

Wed, September 4, 4:30 to 6:00pm, Sheraton New Orleans Hotel, Floor: Four, Oak Alley

Abstract

In “Silicon” cities across the world, tech companies are pursuing mental health treatment and prevention as a site for innovation, intervention, and profit. They promise that embedding diagnostic, therapeutic and other forms of care in digital products like apps, wearables, and robots will enable access to affordable, anywhere, anytime mental health care, untethered from the clinic.

We seek papers that show how STS can interpret, evaluate, and contest techno-optimistic visions of digital mental health interventions as a site of innovation. We want to foster a conversation about the politics of translating signs of psychic suffering into bits of data, by addressing questions such as:

* What visions of care does industry promote and to what extent does it deliver on them, for whom, and at what cost, in both human and ecological terms?
* What are the risks and rewards of disruptive, venture capitalism intervening in mental health care in national and global contexts?
* What can history teach us about past technoscientific forays into the human psyche and the legacies of power embedded in definitions of illness and care?
* How does framing mental health as a technoscientific problem shape cultural conceptions of care and vice versa? To what political purposes have these been put?
* How might STS widen frameworks for mental illness and care (esp. decolonial, queer, disability studies, and feminist approaches)?

We encourage submissions exploring how novel modes of research and representation (e.g. SF, graphic arts, performance) can offer insight into the cultural politics of global digital mental health.

Individual Presentations

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