15: Health and Care Shifts in Times of AI
Susan van Hees, Claudia Egher, Wouter Boon, Karin van Leersum, Alexander Peine, Sally Wyatt, Flora Lysen, Mignon Hagemeijer, Jill van der Kamp, Lotte Krabbenborg, Mira Vegter, Shiwei Chen, Mareike Smolka and Dara Ivanova
AI is being introduced in health and care as a solution for many ongoing societal challenges. It is expected to ensure cost-efficiency, facilitate preventive health transitions, enable faster and better diagnostics, advance precision and personalized medicine. AI is also thought to address the growing workload and ongoing personnel shortages and to enhance citizen (self-)responsibilization and (self-)optimization, etc.
Many STS scholars have started to critically investigate the impact of AI in the fields of health and care and its role in co-producing the problems it is expected to solve. We would like to encourage and explore the value of bringing the great variety of STS scholars and their research topics and contexts together, to enable opportunities for cross-learning and sharing. Therefore, we propose a broad ‘umbrella’-track to cover the wide variety of subtopics at the intersection of health, care, and AI, enabling sessions to dive deep into the many intriguing underlying subtopics and the shifts of and within this field, thereby co-creating an STS platform for studying these topics.
We welcome empirical, theoretical and methodological contributions in all forms in this broad field. Contributions may address, but are not limited to, studies of health and/or care and AI in the context of:
- Innovation and implementation;
- Urgent societal challenges and transformations: epistemic injustices; global inequalities in health access, data sharing, and health benefits; climate change, planetary health concerns; personalized care;
- Tensions informed by automation and scaling;
- The responsibilities of STS scholars and the position of local STS-studies in studying, contextualizing, limiting AI within societal and systemic shifts;
- Redefining health, care, and humanity amid self-optimization and responsibilization trends;
- Novel and more inclusive methodological repertoires;
- Shifting relations and the expanding power of (big) tech in (re)shaping health and care idea(l)s;
- Human-in-the-loop and ‘Responsible AI’: genuine accountability or a mask for tech-driven agendas?;
- Challenging hegemonic structures;
- Knowledge politics; changing expertise, and AI’s influence on what counts as ‘valid’ (medical) knowledge and the value of human experience;
- Underexplored AI-biases (e.g. ageism, healthism);
- Embodiment in digitalized health/care contexts;
- Hidden infrastructures (data storage, interoperability systems, human labor);(Eco)systemic approaches to AI governance and regulation
- Dual use technologies & ‘risky’ cross-fertilizations;
- Patient and/or public engagement with AI-developments in healthcare;
- Embedding current (promissory) discourses in longer histories of (dreams of) automating medical tasks.
Keywords: health, care, AI, knowledge politics, innovation, implementation, transformations, participation, novel methodologies