Call for Papers: Articulations of Health Data and the Home

We are excited to invite abstract submissions for Articulations of Health Data and the Home, a workshop organised by Abby and the DARE team. 

This workshop aims to explore the spatial, relational, epistemological, and biomedical worlds, among others, that are forged in the articulations of health data and the home. It considers the conditions for and contingencies of these articulations, and attends to the relations, spaces, meanings, and knowledges that they produce. 

While the production of health data in the home is not new, the proliferation of digital technologies alongside shifts toward community care and condition self-management, have led to changes in the nature of home-based data practices, related care work, and the production of knowledge. Health data are produced and encountered in the home through multiple formal and informal, continuous and intermittent processes. These include disease monitoring, wellness tracking, and more recently, participation in home-based clinical trials. As such, health data are heterogenous and diverse, grounded in differing lineages, practices, values, logics, imagined futures, and processes of governance. 

At present, the home is seen by biomedical, pharmaceutical, and health policy sectors as offering a particular proximity to everyday life through the production of health data that is more ‘real’, ‘natural’, and ‘accurate’ than those produced in the clinic. However, the home is dynamic, permeable, and multiple; it does not necessarily pre-exist the social practices that bring it into being. The home as a site for health data production leads to new forms of data, shifted practices and routines, and alternative ways of knowing and encountering health and illness. Data practices, in turn, forge new understandings of the home through shifts in relations and rhythms, as well as through emerging negotiations between the clinical/domestic, public/personal, accessible/private.  

We draw on the concept of articulation from cultural studies (e.g. Hall 1980; Slack 1989) as a way of opening up and exploring the diverse and multiple relations between health data and the home. Articulation involves dimensions of previously disparate entities coming together in different combinations to varying effects. This workshop takes health data and home together, in their multiple articulations, to interrogate and juxtapose the myriad worlds that are possible.  

We are keen to include researchers at any career stage working across the social sciences and humanities who foreground nuanced and contextualised accounts of articulations of health data and the home, including nonnormative understandings and experiences of home. We welcome contributions that consider questions such as: 

• What worlds do the articulations of health data and the home produce? What can be known from these articulations? What do they make visible, and what do they obscure?  
• In the context of these articulations between health data and the home, what does the home become? To where does it extend?  
• How might these articulations shift understandings around what is considered health data, and what is considered health? 
• How do these articulations between health data and the home influence the relations between people and their health or illness, relations with their selves, their families, their home, and the health system?  
• Who is produced through these articulations: patients, research participants, people? What are their identities? What are their futures?  
• Other takes on health data and the home not mentioned thus far  

This 1.5-day workshop will be held in-person in Edinburgh, 29 & 30 October 2026. It aims to discuss full working papers that present emerging empirical and theoretical work, with a view to pursuing a special issue. We are thrilled that we will be joined by Professor Henriette Langstrup from the University of Copenhagen, who will deliver the workshop’s keynote address, and Professor Christine Hine from the University of Surrey, who will offer a synthesis and critical commentary of discussions across the workshop.  

Any queries can be directed to Abby. If your work speaks well to this workshop but you’re unable to travel to Edinburgh, please do get in touch to discuss alternative forms of involvement. 

Submit to: abby.king@ed.ac.uk 

Deadline for abstracts (250 words): 30 June 2026 

Notification of acceptance: 10 July 2026 

Workshop in Edinburgh: 29 & 30 October 2026 

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