Peter Danholt - Academia.edu (original) (raw)
Papers by Peter Danholt
Drawing on science and technology studies (STS), and specifically the concept of infrastructure a... more Drawing on science and technology studies (STS), and specifically the concept of infrastructure as conceptualised by Bowker and Star (2000; Star 1999), this paper argues and empirically demonstrates that self-care may be considered a practice that is thoroughly sociotechnical, material, distributed and de-centred. Comparing the practices related to medication in the treatment of asthma, type 2 diabetes and haemophilia, we show that in practice there is no 'self' in self-care. More specifically, the 'self' in self-care is an actor who is highly dependent on, and intertwined with infrastructures of care, in order to be self-caring. Infrastructures of care are the more or less embedded 'tracks' along which care may 'run', shaping and being shaped by actors and settings along the way. Obtaining prescriptions, going to the pharmacy, bringing medication home and administering it as parts of daily life are commonplace activities embedded in the fabric of life, especially for those living with a chronic condition. However, this procurement and emplacement of medication involves the establishment and ongoing enactment of infrastructures of care, that is, the connections between various actors and locations that establish caring spaces and caring selves. Locations and actors are included as allies in treating chronic conditions outside the clinical setting, but these infrastructures may also be ambiguous, with respect to their effects; they may simultaneously contribute to the condition's management and neglect. Particularly precarious is management at the fringes of healthcare infrastructure, where allies, routines and general predictability are scarce. We conclude by arguing that these insights may induce a greater sensitivity to existing infrastructures and practices, when seeking to introduce new infrastructures of care, such as those promoted under the headings of 'telemedicine' and 'healthcare IT'.
transcript Verlag eBooks, Dec 31, 2019
Tidsskriftet Læring og Medier (LOM)
Denne artikel undersøger politiske og teoretiske muligheder for at udvikle en hybrid teknologifor... more Denne artikel undersøger politiske og teoretiske muligheder for at udvikle en hybrid teknologiforståelsesfaglighed, hvilket vil sige en faglighed, der ikke baserer sig på et modsætningsforhold mellem mennesker og teknologier, subjekter og objekter eller kulturer og naturer, men derimod omfavner disse fænomener som sammenblandede og hybride. Artiklen indleder med at sammenfatte forskning i hybriditet fra Science and Technology studies (STS) med særlig fokus på Bruno Latours filosofi og begrebssæt i værket Vi har aldrig været moderne. Herefter analyseres forholdet mellem mennesker og teknologier i det retningsgivende politiske arbejde omkring teknologiforståelse for at identificere muligheder for hybrid teknologiforståelse. Og endelig diskuterer artiklen hvordan STS-begreberne om netværk, translation, matters of concern og performativitet kan informere en videreudvikling af de eksisterende kompetenceområder fra forsøgsfaget til i højere grad at omfavne teknologier, mennesker og samfun...
This paper considers performative aspects of prototyping in design. Drawing on STS and a casestud... more This paper considers performative aspects of prototyping in design. Drawing on STS and a casestudy involving a prototypical disease management technology, it exemplify and discuss prototyping as a performative process that produces specific subjectivities and bodies. Prototypes are not only vehicles for learning or containers of ideas, but material things that prescribe, animate and produce bodies and agencies. Viewed as such perplexity, inconsistency and contradictions is not anomalies in design, but to be expected because users as well as designers are in a process of exploration and experimentation. Equally prototypes are both concrete and present as well imaginary and futuristic. The author argue that designers and researchers should sensitize themselves to performative aspects of prototyping in order to understand the mutually transformative consequences for both artifacts and humans in these processes.
STS Encounters
In this paper, we propose a cosmopolitical approach to, and understanding of, data, based on the... more In this paper, we propose a cosmopolitical approach to, and understanding of, data, based on the work of Isabelle Stengers. This entails appreciating data as constituted through multiple actors and actions, and, accordingly, as something capable of producing unanticipated, surprising consequences. Cosmopolitics helps us think about data, and datafication, as actors in a more-than-human world in ways that transgress a common and widespread perception of data as either neutral, objective and representational or as socially constructed, perspectivist and endowed with human politics. The argument is thus that data and datafication change practices and can bring forth novel layers and qualities of those practices. We explore data through a cosmopolitical approach using two empirical examples generated during 2013-2017, where the authors carried out ethnographic fieldwork in a project on governing and managing healthcare data. We conclude by proposing the term cosmo-data-politics and di...
STS Encounters
From the introduction: The notion of society provided by the French philosopher Gabriel Tarde cha... more From the introduction: The notion of society provided by the French philosopher Gabriel Tarde challenges the idea that society - or rather societies - are exclusively human. Rather, societies are all around, above, below, besides and inside of the human and on a scale ranging from the minuscule to the interstellar, arguably. Such a definition of society is fascinating, since taken for granted notions of society and the social that implicitly rely on society as being exclusively human, become in return destabilized. We are invited to think, study and act the social and society differently. This special issue constitutes an attempt at such an invitation.
STS Encounters
From the introduction: This special issue is dedicated to the exploration of experiments and expe... more From the introduction: This special issue is dedicated to the exploration of experiments and experimentation. It follows a PhD. course entitled “Exploring and performing experiments” that we organized at Department of Digital Design and Information Studies in spring 2019. The course was attended by 12 PhD fellows, and during the course we and the participants decided to produce a special issue based on the participants’ PhD research projects. The literature for the course included a variety of texts and research articles focusing on experiments mainly from the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS). The readings included the work of Ian Hacking, Andy Pickering, Bruno Latour, Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Isabelle Stengers, Shirley Strum and Brian Eno among others. In the call for papers for this issue authors were asked to draw on the literature in the field of STS in order to explore the role of experiments and experimentation in their own projects, and to consider their...
STS Encounters
All of the contributions to this special issue are occupied with how to engage data otherwise. Th... more All of the contributions to this special issue are occupied with how to engage data otherwise. This otherwise indexes the rich variety of approaches to data beyond what we are currently witnessing. Whether through the development of politically and ethically relevant forms of data experiments, or the construction of alternative visions of the much-critiqued data infrastructures of powerful platform providers, all the articles reflect upon how we - as scholars and citizens - can live and work with data in ways amenable to diverse, critical, and ethical forms of social existence. This introduction intervenes in this debate in its own particular way, principally by considering what it means to characterise the contemporary as a data moment. The term data moment, we argue, works as a conceptual device calling for more ethical-political engagement with data practices. At the same time, it also retains a temporal inflection. Moments, we claim, are not sequential steps in a linear process,...
The British Journal of Social Work
This article presents a scoping review of the existing research on the use of digital data in soc... more This article presents a scoping review of the existing research on the use of digital data in social work. This review focuses on research that includes empirical investigations of digital data on citizens in social work practices. The purpose of this review is to map the emerging field of research and contribute knowledge of the role of digital data on citizens in social work. This review includes twenty-eight articles published between 2013 and 2020, and concludes that data pervade almost every aspect of social work and that there is a variety of research on the use of data in social work. However, detailed analyses of data that describe and conceptualise the production, circulation and utilisation of data are few. In consequence, this article introduces and discusses concepts from other data-laden fields of research, and calls for further research that addresses the challenges presented by digital data used in social work.
BOOK of
The discourses and practices of genetics surround us today as never before, and have become a maj... more The discourses and practices of genetics surround us today as never before, and have become a major component of our ideas of personhood and identity. In contemporary biomedicine, many illnesses and pathologies have been reorganized along a genetic axis. The growing use of predictive genetic diagnostics and genome analysis–now offered by private companies directly to the public–and the new dimension of “genetic risk” they introduce, have contributed to the emergence of a new “genetically responsible subject”–a ...
DASTS is the primary academic association for STS in Denmark. Its purpose is to develop the quali... more DASTS is the primary academic association for STS in Denmark. Its purpose is to develop the quality and breadth of STS research within Denmark, while generating and developing national and international collaboration.
Reimbursement and budgeting constitutes a central infrastructural element in most secondary healt... more Reimbursement and budgeting constitutes a central infrastructural element in most secondary healthcare sectors. In Denmark, Diagnose-Related Groups (DRG) function as the core element for budgeting and encouraging increase in activity and effectivity. However, DRG is known to potentially have adverse effects by encouraging hospitals to maximize reimbursement at the expense of patients. To counter this, one Danish region has initiated an experiment involving nine hospital departments whose normal budgeting and reimbursement based on DRG is put on hold. Instead, they have been asked to develop indicators for quality in treatment to guide and govern their performance, in order to investigate whether this may generate a new performance measurement infrastructure that will improve quality of healthcare. The project is entitled: “New governance in the patient’s perspective”.
Drawing on science and technology studies (STS), and specifically the concept of infrastructure a... more Drawing on science and technology studies (STS), and specifically the concept of infrastructure as conceptualised by Bowker and Star (2000; Star 1999), this paper argues and empirically demonstrates that self-care may be considered a practice that is thoroughly sociotechnical, material, distributed and de-centred. Comparing the practices related to medication in the treatment of asthma, type 2 diabetes and haemophilia, we show that in practice there is no 'self' in self-care. More specifically, the 'self' in self-care is an actor who is highly dependent on, and intertwined with infrastructures of care, in order to be self-caring. Infrastructures of care are the more or less embedded 'tracks' along which care may 'run', shaping and being shaped by actors and settings along the way. Obtaining prescriptions, going to the pharmacy, bringing medication home and administering it as parts of daily life are commonplace activities embedded in the fabric of life, especially for those living with a chronic condition. However, this procurement and emplacement of medication involves the establishment and ongoing enactment of infrastructures of care, that is, the connections between various actors and locations that establish caring spaces and caring selves. Locations and actors are included as allies in treating chronic conditions outside the clinical setting, but these infrastructures may also be ambiguous, with respect to their effects; they may simultaneously contribute to the condition's management and neglect. Particularly precarious is management at the fringes of healthcare infrastructure, where allies, routines and general predictability are scarce. We conclude by arguing that these insights may induce a greater sensitivity to existing infrastructures and practices, when seeking to introduce new infrastructures of care, such as those promoted under the headings of 'telemedicine' and 'healthcare IT'.
transcript Verlag eBooks, Dec 31, 2019
Tidsskriftet Læring og Medier (LOM)
Denne artikel undersøger politiske og teoretiske muligheder for at udvikle en hybrid teknologifor... more Denne artikel undersøger politiske og teoretiske muligheder for at udvikle en hybrid teknologiforståelsesfaglighed, hvilket vil sige en faglighed, der ikke baserer sig på et modsætningsforhold mellem mennesker og teknologier, subjekter og objekter eller kulturer og naturer, men derimod omfavner disse fænomener som sammenblandede og hybride. Artiklen indleder med at sammenfatte forskning i hybriditet fra Science and Technology studies (STS) med særlig fokus på Bruno Latours filosofi og begrebssæt i værket Vi har aldrig været moderne. Herefter analyseres forholdet mellem mennesker og teknologier i det retningsgivende politiske arbejde omkring teknologiforståelse for at identificere muligheder for hybrid teknologiforståelse. Og endelig diskuterer artiklen hvordan STS-begreberne om netværk, translation, matters of concern og performativitet kan informere en videreudvikling af de eksisterende kompetenceområder fra forsøgsfaget til i højere grad at omfavne teknologier, mennesker og samfun...
This paper considers performative aspects of prototyping in design. Drawing on STS and a casestud... more This paper considers performative aspects of prototyping in design. Drawing on STS and a casestudy involving a prototypical disease management technology, it exemplify and discuss prototyping as a performative process that produces specific subjectivities and bodies. Prototypes are not only vehicles for learning or containers of ideas, but material things that prescribe, animate and produce bodies and agencies. Viewed as such perplexity, inconsistency and contradictions is not anomalies in design, but to be expected because users as well as designers are in a process of exploration and experimentation. Equally prototypes are both concrete and present as well imaginary and futuristic. The author argue that designers and researchers should sensitize themselves to performative aspects of prototyping in order to understand the mutually transformative consequences for both artifacts and humans in these processes.
STS Encounters
In this paper, we propose a cosmopolitical approach to, and understanding of, data, based on the... more In this paper, we propose a cosmopolitical approach to, and understanding of, data, based on the work of Isabelle Stengers. This entails appreciating data as constituted through multiple actors and actions, and, accordingly, as something capable of producing unanticipated, surprising consequences. Cosmopolitics helps us think about data, and datafication, as actors in a more-than-human world in ways that transgress a common and widespread perception of data as either neutral, objective and representational or as socially constructed, perspectivist and endowed with human politics. The argument is thus that data and datafication change practices and can bring forth novel layers and qualities of those practices. We explore data through a cosmopolitical approach using two empirical examples generated during 2013-2017, where the authors carried out ethnographic fieldwork in a project on governing and managing healthcare data. We conclude by proposing the term cosmo-data-politics and di...
STS Encounters
From the introduction: The notion of society provided by the French philosopher Gabriel Tarde cha... more From the introduction: The notion of society provided by the French philosopher Gabriel Tarde challenges the idea that society - or rather societies - are exclusively human. Rather, societies are all around, above, below, besides and inside of the human and on a scale ranging from the minuscule to the interstellar, arguably. Such a definition of society is fascinating, since taken for granted notions of society and the social that implicitly rely on society as being exclusively human, become in return destabilized. We are invited to think, study and act the social and society differently. This special issue constitutes an attempt at such an invitation.
STS Encounters
From the introduction: This special issue is dedicated to the exploration of experiments and expe... more From the introduction: This special issue is dedicated to the exploration of experiments and experimentation. It follows a PhD. course entitled “Exploring and performing experiments” that we organized at Department of Digital Design and Information Studies in spring 2019. The course was attended by 12 PhD fellows, and during the course we and the participants decided to produce a special issue based on the participants’ PhD research projects. The literature for the course included a variety of texts and research articles focusing on experiments mainly from the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS). The readings included the work of Ian Hacking, Andy Pickering, Bruno Latour, Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Isabelle Stengers, Shirley Strum and Brian Eno among others. In the call for papers for this issue authors were asked to draw on the literature in the field of STS in order to explore the role of experiments and experimentation in their own projects, and to consider their...
STS Encounters
All of the contributions to this special issue are occupied with how to engage data otherwise. Th... more All of the contributions to this special issue are occupied with how to engage data otherwise. This otherwise indexes the rich variety of approaches to data beyond what we are currently witnessing. Whether through the development of politically and ethically relevant forms of data experiments, or the construction of alternative visions of the much-critiqued data infrastructures of powerful platform providers, all the articles reflect upon how we - as scholars and citizens - can live and work with data in ways amenable to diverse, critical, and ethical forms of social existence. This introduction intervenes in this debate in its own particular way, principally by considering what it means to characterise the contemporary as a data moment. The term data moment, we argue, works as a conceptual device calling for more ethical-political engagement with data practices. At the same time, it also retains a temporal inflection. Moments, we claim, are not sequential steps in a linear process,...
The British Journal of Social Work
This article presents a scoping review of the existing research on the use of digital data in soc... more This article presents a scoping review of the existing research on the use of digital data in social work. This review focuses on research that includes empirical investigations of digital data on citizens in social work practices. The purpose of this review is to map the emerging field of research and contribute knowledge of the role of digital data on citizens in social work. This review includes twenty-eight articles published between 2013 and 2020, and concludes that data pervade almost every aspect of social work and that there is a variety of research on the use of data in social work. However, detailed analyses of data that describe and conceptualise the production, circulation and utilisation of data are few. In consequence, this article introduces and discusses concepts from other data-laden fields of research, and calls for further research that addresses the challenges presented by digital data used in social work.
BOOK of
The discourses and practices of genetics surround us today as never before, and have become a maj... more The discourses and practices of genetics surround us today as never before, and have become a major component of our ideas of personhood and identity. In contemporary biomedicine, many illnesses and pathologies have been reorganized along a genetic axis. The growing use of predictive genetic diagnostics and genome analysis–now offered by private companies directly to the public–and the new dimension of “genetic risk” they introduce, have contributed to the emergence of a new “genetically responsible subject”–a ...
DASTS is the primary academic association for STS in Denmark. Its purpose is to develop the quali... more DASTS is the primary academic association for STS in Denmark. Its purpose is to develop the quality and breadth of STS research within Denmark, while generating and developing national and international collaboration.
Reimbursement and budgeting constitutes a central infrastructural element in most secondary healt... more Reimbursement and budgeting constitutes a central infrastructural element in most secondary healthcare sectors. In Denmark, Diagnose-Related Groups (DRG) function as the core element for budgeting and encouraging increase in activity and effectivity. However, DRG is known to potentially have adverse effects by encouraging hospitals to maximize reimbursement at the expense of patients. To counter this, one Danish region has initiated an experiment involving nine hospital departments whose normal budgeting and reimbursement based on DRG is put on hold. Instead, they have been asked to develop indicators for quality in treatment to guide and govern their performance, in order to investigate whether this may generate a new performance measurement infrastructure that will improve quality of healthcare. The project is entitled: “New governance in the patient’s perspective”.