Some reflections on a week in Amsterdam....

From 16th July –19th July 2024, academics from all over the world coalesced in Amsterdam for the European Association for the Study of Science and Technology (EASST) and the Society For Social Studies Of Science (4S) joint conference. 

EASST-4S brings together researchers from a broad range of scholarly disciplines, primarily those sciences that are in some way ‘social’, and which investigate the role of expertise as it is encoded in science and technology. Over 3,500 attendees over four full days of the conference saw panels that covered hugely diverse topics like the rise of platform power in the adtech market, the use of metadata in scholarly publishing, as well as cross-border health data infrastructures (and those are just the ones I managed to attend, which is to say nothing of the discussions on pharmacology, urban planning, and the new technologies in food and agriculture, all of which I unfortunately missed due to clashes!).

On Friday DARE project PI, Catherine Montgomery and I (Postdoctoral Research Fellow — Max Perry) spoke at panels about our work on healthcare data. Catherine presented at a panel that asked How to Research Medical AI. There she sketched out how we, in the DARE project, are investigating healthcare technologies with a specific argument about why we are focusing on Data (and not on the amorphous target of AI – taking our lead from the excellent paper by Lucy Suchman which questions the ‘thingness’ of AI). Later in the day, I presented a provocation regarding the epistemic values of ‘digital diagnosis’ through a (sort of) soteriological reading of policy, which used my PhD work as an empirical base. 

Both panels were well attended, generated generous and useful discussion, and started several conversations that might lead to future collaborations with other researchers working on similar questions in other health systems around the world. Such is the value of academic conferences; the transmission of information feels like it is in service to emergent collaborations, more than to passive dissemination. As the project remains in its infancy these discussions are of great value in thinking about how we will shape the work, how our work relates to, and intersects with the work of academic colleagues around the globe, and —perhaps even more vitally— through the thoughtful engagement of other academics animates us with renewed enthusiasm for the scholarly work ahead. Speaking personally these conversations with other academics about the work we in the DARE project are embarking on, the research questions that guide us, and the empirical sensibilities of the project, as well as those conversations discussing the perilous empirical, ethical, and epistemic challenges that lay ahead, reminds me why I enjoy academic work so much, why discovering things about the world is so important, and what value knowing things can add. I feel passionately about the important questions that we are following, and EASST-4S was a great reminder of why I feel so passionate about them.

I sat in the audience whilst Catherine carefully laid out the scope and tentative shape of the DARE project. It was nice, sat anonymously at the back of the room, to see the other scholars leaning forward, making notes, nodding along, and then finally, when it came time for questions, intervening with questions ranging from ‘the intellectual baggage of the word ‘Scales’’, to the importance of reflexivity, and to the practicalities of drawing such diverse fieldwork as ours together. This collection of what were (to me) strangers all contributing in their own way towards the intellectual shaping of the project, and it is exciting to imagine what the presentations and questions will look like in 4 years time when we are at the end of the project. What type of world(s) will we have discovered, and what types of interventions, curiosities, and questions will those discoveries evoke?

Now back in Edinburgh, in the office I share with the other post-docs who are fast becoming friends as much as colleagues, pleasingly, I must get back to work.