233046 SE Digital by Disaster (2023W)

Quickly after the COVID-19 outbreak, governments and health institutions around the world started to use data and digital technologies to model, manage, and monitor COVID-19 in real time following patterns of techno-solutionism. Accordingly, the pandemic has been described in terms of a global “data event” or “the first pandemic of the datafied society”. Three years into the pandemic we have seen the disruptive COVID-19 outbreak transforming into a “slow disaster”. The seminar Digital by Disaster aims at tracing, reconstructing, and analyzing digital responses to COVID-19 and the way they re-order knowledge and policy. The following questions will be addressed: How is scientific knowledge created in times of crisis and how are computer simulations used as “evidence” in policy-making? How does the quantification of public health, or “lively data”, contribute to the governance of risks and uncertainties? How do data and algorithmic systems co-produce bias and discrimination in public sectors? How is digital health tracking used to empower, manage, and control populations? How do media and social media contribute to the circulation of scientific facts and fakes? And what can we learn from COVID-19 for other disasters, climate change most importantly?

To answer these questions, students will learn how to critically engage with literature at the intersection of STS, disaster research, and critical data studies and how to relate theoretical concepts to empirical case studies. Starting from students’ own experiences with digital technologies used to contain the pandemic, we will discuss digital responses to COVID-19 and embed them in larger discourses on disaster politics, datafication of public sectors, public health most importantly, as well as scientific controversies. Each unit will be composed of discussions based on compulsory literature, and an empirical case study presented by student groups (based on suggested readings and a related empirical “case”). This study can (but must not) serve as groundwork for the term paper, in which each student will individually outline (or conduct?) a small empirical project by combining the seminar literature with a small-scale “study” - e.g. analysis of a COVID-19 (or climate change-)related blog, platform, or dashboard, interview(s) with users, discourse analysis of a small media, policy, or social media sample discussing COVID-19-related/ climate change controversies etc. The main aim of the seminar is to collectively learn how to combine theoretical concepts with empirical research, how to give and get feed-back on students’ projects, and how to outline a small empirical study embedded in the seminar literature. Ongoing discussions of written assignments and oral presentations will help students to write their term papers. Teaching and readings are in English and students must be able to write and present their assignments in English.