[Commlist] CFP: Deceptive narratives and epistemic justice in technologies of care, 4S 2025

You are welcome to join interdisciplinary communication/STS folks in an 
open panel at the upcoming 4S conference. Abstract deadline is January 31.

*Call for Papers: Deceptive narratives and epistemic justice in 
technologies of care, 4S 2025, Seattle 3-7 September*

Abstract due date: 31 January 2025

To submit, please go to the 4S submission page and select Open Panel #47
*https://www.4sonline.org/accepted_open_panels_seattle.php*
Alison Powell and Philipp Seuferling invite you to join us in 
questioning the value placed on data, computational capacity or 
objectivity in health and care, broadly interpreted. Technologizing care 
can invoke deceptive, unhelpful stories of innovation: obsessions with 
efficiency have led to projects of “blitzscaling” the UK’s National 
Health Service, privatising genomic data in digital databases that go 
bankrupt (e.g. 23andMe), or datafying the provision of humanitarian 
care. The recasting of care into computational and algorithmic routines 
is often justified with stories of increased access, fairness or lower cost.
These benefits tend to be deceptively narrated in opposition to 
epistemic threats such as the erosion of clinical authority or the 
dismissal of lived experience in favour of objective evidence (Powell, 
2024) – causing amnesia (Schneider, 2024). Such amnesia reverberates: 
historical capacities and knowledges are dismissed, leading to epistemic 
conflicts, commonly held knowledge appropriated, and principles of 
solidarity in care provision undermined.
We wonder:

  *
    How do deceptive narratives around sociotechnical systems lead to
    epistemic injustices?
  *
    How are designs of technologised care enmeshed with epistemic
    struggles – potentially unequal and unjust?
  *
    How can care be thought and built otherwise – against, mindful of,
    or even embracing amnesia, and reclaiming solidarity?

This panel welcomes interventions on reverberations between information 
infrastructures, epistemic struggles, labour, care, materiality, history 
and liberation, such as:

  *
    Sociomaterial studies of technologized infrastructures of care (such
    as automation of care work, electronic health records, AI diagnostics)
  *
    Investigations of the consequences of infrastructural design for
    care data systems (such as private genomics databases or AI training
    data)
  *
    Theorizations of legitimacy and epistemic justice in relation to
    technology and care

Submit 300 word abstracts by Jan 31 at: 
*https://www.4sonline.org/accepted_open_panels_seattle.php*
Any questions get in touch with Alison or Philipp
Alison Powell: (_a.powell /at/ lse.ac.uk) <mailto:(a.powell /at/ lse.ac.uk)>_
Philipp Seuferling: (_p.seuferling /at/ lse.ac.uk) <mailto:(p.seuferling /at/ lse.ac.uk)>_



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