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Analyze

What is the main argument, narrative and effect of this text?

margauxf

The authors review literature on the datafication of health, which they identify as the way through which health has been quantified on a number of different scales and registers. They focus primarily on the datafication of health in clinical health care and self-care practices, rather than medical research and public health infrastructures. From this literature, they identify three key themes: datafied power (the ways through which data permeates and exerts power over forms of life), living with data (focused on datafication as an intimate form of surveillance, and a technology of the self), and data-human mediations (which emphasizes the nonhuman elements mediating datafication dynamics and experiences—such as algorithms, data infrastructure and data itself).

 

In examining literature on datafied power, the authors acknowledge a lack of scholarship on understanding data and datafication in terms agency, rather than simply power and domination. For instance, data is sometimes mobilized in “creative and even pioneering ways (Rapp 2016)” (265).

 

They describe literature on “living with data” as increasingly focus examining the social, narrative, and affective dimensions of data practices and experiences (e.g. work on the “Quantified Self,” a group seeking self-knowledge through numbers – a form of relationality that might be described as datasociality). Some scholars have argued that data can render “‘feelings and problems more tangible and comparable” (Sharon & Zandbergen 2016, p. 11)” (267). Some have also acknowledged as well a “curious resonance between the vision of empowered, resisting individuals that many ethnographers of self-tracking celebrate, and the rhetoric of consumer empowerment found in discourses of digital health (Schull 2017, Sharon 2017)” (267).

 

The literature on data-human mediations emphasizes the agency, liveliness and/or performativity of nonhuman elements—essentially, how they structure and shape the possibilities for action. For instance: “as social expectations of normality and health become embedded in tracking devices’ target numbers, presentation of scores, and gamified incentives (Depper & Howe 2017, Whitson 2013), a “numerical ontology” comes to suffuse everyday practices and “the ways in which people relate to their own bodies” (Oxlund 2012, p. 53; see also Jethani 2015, p. 40)” (269). Perspectives and action can be enabled or disabled by wide variety of factors: the design and performativity of data technology software (user interface, operational and analytical algorithms), hardware (devices, sensors), data itself (as illustrated in different ways), and data infrastructures (labs, data centers, serve and cloud storage, and networks that organize how data is stored and circulated). An analytically constructive focus in this literature has emerged by applying the concept of “assemblage” as a way of tracing how data moves: “where it flows, where it finds impasses, how algorithms act on it along the way” (270).

 

Lastly, the authors identify scholarship on “data activism” as an emerging focus on exploring how data technology capacities might be employed to promote social justice, collective action, and political participation, as well as to challenged dominant norms and ideologies: “Individual self-tracking data, for instance, can have social and political potential when it is pooled to identify health inequalities, collective environmental exposure, or disparities in quality of life (Gabrys 2014).” (271)

 

Responsive Curriculums

prerna_srigyan
  • The process of designing curriculum is quite useful as it details how different activities correspond to learning goals in science, mathematics, and technology. Fig. 3 describes the steps: selecting content through content specialists in the POAC team, making a curriculum outline, individual meetings with content specialists, and making the lesson plans. I really like the activities they designed, such as comparing different mask materials and how they protected against differently-sized viruses. They were also given time to research career pathways and present on epidemiology careers, a step that invites students to imagine career pathways. 

  • I realize the scope and audience of this paper is different, but I am so curious about how the Imhotep Academy created a setting that encouraged underrepresented students to participate and speak up, given that they cite evidence of how difficult that can be. How did they choose participants? 

  • Having read Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed recently, I am thinking about his approach to curriculum design that is based on a feedback loop between would-be learners and would-be educators. The roles of learners and educators aren’t fixed. Content development is not done beforehand just by content specialists but in an iterative process with multiple feedback loops. Since very few research teams have the time or the resources to deploy Freire’s rigorous approach, I am not surprised that most curriculum development does not follow the route. And educators are working with former experiences anyway. So I am curious about how the authors’ previous experiences shaped their approach to curriculum design?

  • A context for this paper is the controversy on the proposed revisions to the California math curriculum that conservative media outlets argue “waters down” calculus–a cherry topping on the college admissions cake–to privilege data science in middle-school grades. Education researchers contend that apart from physics and engineering majors, not many colleges actually require calculus for admissions (many private institutions do), and that the relevance of advanced calculus for college preparation is overrated. 

  • National Commission on Excellence in Education ‘s 1983 report Nation At Risk: the need for a new STEM workforce specializing in computer science and technology 

  • National Council on Mathematics 2000 guidelines for preparing American students for college in Common Core Mathematics 

  • Stuck in the Shallow End: Virtual segregation; Inequality in learning computer science in American schools focusing on Black students 

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Zackery.White

International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW) was founded in 1980 by physicians from the United States and the former Soviet Union who shared a common commitment to the prevention of nuclear war between their two countries. In 1985, the organization recieved the nobel peace prize for their efforts.

pece_annotation_1478548541

Zackery.White

IPPNW is comprised of national medical organizations, not individuals, with a common commitment to the abolition of nuclear weapons and the prevention of war. Each organization may range in size from a handful of dedicated physicians and medical students to tens of thousands of activists and their supporters.

pece_annotation_1478549020

Zackery.White

I can't really find any concise information in regards to the IIPNW having direct publications or legislation passed. They seem as more of an organization that compiles information, and presents at global colloquiums in order to swy opinions for preventions of escalation. They also have many outreach programs for new physicians that help support the idea of nuclear prevention. 

pece_annotation_1478549176

Zackery.White

The largest event that affects this organization was the Cold War, becuase it was the reason that it was formed in 1980. The organization cites the first principal of the medical profession — that doctors have an obligation to prevent what they cannot treat. The website states that experts come together to explain the medical and scientific facts about nuclear war to policy makers and to the public, and to advocate for the elimination of nuclear weapons from the world’s arsenals.