Kevin Hall
Postdoctoral fellow at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology
Hall is a postdoctoral fellow at the Department for Sociology and Political Science at the Norwegian University for Science and Technology (NTNU). His research focuses on practices of biosecurity, datafication and surveillance of health and disease at the interface of pathogen, vector, population and public health administration. Drawing on Science & Technology Studies, Surveillance Studies and post-structuralist theory his research focuses on the socio-technical assemblages and processes that breathe life into epistemic objects such as health, population or virus. He holds a diploma in biochemistry, a MA in philosophy and sociology and a PhD in cultural anthropology from the Goethe University of Frankfurt.
Tell us about your project!
As part of the European Data Strategy the European Commission recently announced the creation of the European Health Data Space (EHDS). The EHDS proposes to reconcile the data needs of policy makers, health care providers, scientists and businesses with the privacy needs of citizens and the accompanying legislature of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Health Data of the population are to be captured and made available for secondary use in order to ‘unleash the data economy by fostering a genuine single market for digital health services and products’ (European Commission 2022a). Drawing on STS scholarship on infrastructures my project aims to analyze the political rationalities of emergent digital infrastructures and practices of datafication in health-related work. In particular, I am interested in the co-production of digital polities, practices of economization and valuation as well as practices of standardization and sense-making alongside the digitalization of public health administration.
“Drawing on STS scholarship on infrastructures my project aims to analyze the political rationalities of emergent digital infrastructures and practices of datafication in health-related work”
— Hall on his research project “Datafying the Population: The political rationalities of the emergent European Health Data Space and its infrastructures”
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