Session: Strategies and Tools for Inclusive Healthcare and Health Research
Quantifying Others, Quantifying Ourselves: What an Intersectional Ethical Critique of mHealth Applications Reveals About Constructing Inclusive Digital Tools and Discourses
Saturday, October 14, 2023
1:15 PM – 2:30 PM ET
Location: Iron (Fourth Floor)
With mHealth applications, we can track every detail of our lives—from how much we sleep to what we eat to how many steps we take. But as technologies of power that extend into new spaces, these tools are leading to novel forms of self-discipline. In offering platforms for vast data collection and, thus, qualification and correction, they enable users to constantly surveil and compare themselves with social, cultural, and medical norms that frequently depreciate the social determinants of health. Moreover, in sorting individuals, self-tracking technologies can help secure the boundaries between healthy/unhealthy, us/them, or exclusion/inclusion. Such delineations have the potential to create and reinforce new and existing disparities and justifications for discrimination. This reality emphasizes the need for inclusive interaction and deliberation critically grounded in the socio-historical contexts shaping mHealth applications.
Drawing from various perspectives (queer, critical race, feminist, postcolonial, Neo-Foucauldian), this paper uniquely adopts an Intersectional approach to studying the ethical dimensions of these computational systems and the quantified-self movement driving adoption. It explores not only the role of tech in establishing and evaluating criteria around what it means to be “healthy,” but how such tools feed into illusions that poor health is a matter of choice. Such an investigation is critical to understanding how these algorithmic systems reproduce inequalities—including by perpetuating dominant discourses that fail to recognize historical, systematic, and structural barriers (poverty, racism, marginalization) to “good” health. This research concludes with asking how we can best solicit the perspectives of diverse stakeholders moving forward.