Border Quants: Biopolitics of Self-Quantification at the Border

Session Submission Type: Traditional (Closed) Panel

Abstract

Personal quantification with wearable sensor technology continues to grow as a dominant force in health and lifestyle practices as the consumer wearables market expands with billions of wearable devices in use, and annual global market trends predicted to exceed 6 billion USD in 2018. Despite the economic monolith of the consumer wearables industry, the individual use experience is nuanced and variable. An emerging wearables literature suggests that wearable quantification devices do not drive behavior change, but rather are a tool to facilitate behaviors. Indeed, the use experience is highly nuanced and variable, raising questions about the biopolitics of quantification technologies as a locus of social control enabled by big data surveillance or a tool for decolonizing individual empowerment enacted through human-centered N-of-1 approaches.
Borders are constructed in geography, society, discipline, practice, performance, and method, offering a variety of borderlands in which to explore the biopolitics of human-centered quantification as a tool of empowered self-knowledge production versus an instrument of social control. The Border Quants research group approaches each of these borders individually and collectively through a series of practice, performance, and research approaches using a shared feminist theoretical lens and a common quantification approach with the Jawbone 3 activity tracker. This panel presents a series of individual papers from the Border Quants research group exploring how individual quantification using wearable sensor technology shapes the regulation and production of knowledge in a collection of research, practice, and performance cases situated in a variety of conceptual borderlands.

Sub Unit

• 4S Annual Meeting

Chair

• Jamie Winterton, Arizona State University

Individual Presentations

• Indigenous Women's Subjective Experiences Using Health-Based Activity Monitors Toward Personal Wellbeing - Marisa Elena Duarte, Arizona State University

• Embodying Data: Duoethnography as a Feminist Methodology for Studying Wearables - Marika Cifor, University of California, Los Angeles; Patricia Garcia, School of Information, University of Michigan

• Not My Data: Troubling Notions of Embodied Agency in Consumer Wearables - Jessica Jean Rajko, Arizona State University

• Testing the Limits of the Quantified Self at the Qual-Quant Borderland: What Can Data Quantification Tell Us About Lived Experience? - Heather M Ross, Arizona State University