Activities

Waiting for Evidence

How do we understand or attend to evidence that is in the process of revealing itself, and to the uncertainties and confusions of being in the midst of an event? Isabel Davis, Sophie Day and Felicity Callard discuss how the unfolding temporalities of chronic illness or pregnancy can complicate ideas of evidence and how it […]

Panel Event

16 July, 2021 14:00 – 15:30

Sophie Day,

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Long COVID: a new condition shaped by shared experience and patient activism

According to Callard and Perego (2021), “Long Covid has a strong claim to be considered the first illness to be collectively made by patients finding one another through Twitter and other social media.” In the first few months of the pandemic, people with COVID-19 started to report unexpected persistent and fluctuating symptoms, including in people […]

Lecture Event

29 June, 2021

Helen Ward

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What Defines a ‘Clinically Extremely Vulnerable Person’? Learning to See Algorithmic Decision Making

The UK population has been asked to practice social distancing during national lockdowns. But one newly created category of people have been asked to pay special care to reduce their own exposure to COVID-19. These ‘clinically extremely vulnerable’ people were asked to take action beyond normal social distancing to protect themselves. In this presentation we […]

Panel Event

21 April, 2021

Rozlyn Redd, William Viney

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Personalisation Practices in Cancer Research

Our research in a busy west London breast cancer service has observed developments associated with personalised medicine and healthcare – screening and diagnostic technologies, treatments, translational research, and data sharing techniques. This talk will introduce and discuss the emergence of personalised practices in this hospital service when, in 2020-21, they were affected by COVID-19.

Panel Event

16 March, 2021 17:00 – 19:00

William Viney

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Timely figurations of personalised medicine

Personalised’ or ‘precision’ medicine promises the ‘right treatment, to right person, at the right time’ in contrast to standard one-size-fits-all approaches. But what is the right time for personalised medicine? Using liquid biopsies, early findings suggest that it is possible to predict the molecular relapse of breast cancer up to two years in advance of […]

Panel Event

5 March, 2021

William Viney

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Understandings of the experimental in breast cancer care

Drawing on interviews with staff and patients, we ask how breast cancer care in 2020 has affected views of a previous targeted, tailored or personalised medicine. How is this form of experimental care – simultaneously research and treatment – reconfigured in retrospect? In 2018 we returned to a research-intensive breast cancer service we had studied five years previously (Day et […]

Panel Event

4 March, 2021

Sophie Day, Helen Ward

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What is a person in contemporary pathways of personalisation?

Moving between two strands of our work on personalised cancer medicine, I ask about the persons that emerge through fieldwork in a large breast cancer service and a poetry residency in the hospital and a neighbouring NGO. I will share elements from fieldwork and from Written Portraits by Di Sherlock, the poetry collection that we […]

Lecture Event

27 November, 2020 15:00 – 17:00

Sophie Day

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Inhabiting The Algorithm. The Making Of A Smartphone App To Explore How People Became Habituated To Algorithmic Profiling And Recommendation Systems

This paper presents some findings of the interdisciplinary project ‘Algorithmic Identities.’ This project was devised to study how people feel, react and thematise the extraction of digital data and algorithmic inferences about their personhoods. Considering the proprietary, opaque and inscrutable algorithmic systems of major online services and social media platforms, we adopted a critical making […]

Panel Event

18 August, 2020

Celia Lury, Martin Tironi, Scott Wark, Matías Valderrama, Andre Simon, Denis Parra

Platforming the Social

Media platforms exploit networks to produce relations. Scholars often talk about two main kinds: economic relations, whereby platforms produce value for owners; and participatory relations. But platforms also produce a specific social relation: a mediated form of communality, or common-being online. This paper will use the platform as a conceptual frame for analysing the different […]

Panel Event

18 August, 2020

Scott Wark

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Synchrony: Practicing distributive uncertainty in the continuous present

Gregory Bateson was notoriously cautious about making causal claims and wary of established forms of historiography, that is, predicting future effects on the grounds of past causes. In a discussion of the culture of the Iatmul (a tribe in New Guinea) he says that it, ‘like all other cultures is really an elaborate reticulum of […]

Panel Event

24 October, 2019

Celia Lury

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Call for Papers – ‘Figurations: Persons In/Out of Data’

16-17 December, 2019, Goldsmiths, University of London Abstracts due: July 1st, 2019. Submit here. Confirmed keynotes: Professor Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Simon Fraser University Professor Jane Elliot, University of Exeter Professor John Frow, The University of Sydney Professor Susanne Kuechler, University College London Professor AbdouMaliq Simone, The University of Sheffield We’re drowning in an ocean of data, […]

Panel Event

1 July, 2019 23:59

Ethnographies of disease stratification: Understanding novel clinical practices and their social consequences in contemporary cancer care

The biomedical ability to detect specific molecular features of tumours is driving clinical innovation towards more precise diagnoses and more effective treatments by way of “stratification”. These innovations inspire new hopes for more effective and targeted treatments with fewer side effects. However, they also provoke major dilemmas around individual and population-wide treatment decisions, equity of […]

Panel Event

12 April, 2019 15:00

Sophie Day

Personalised medicine: The social challenges

One day launch event to a new seminar and workshop series across 2019-2020, sponsored by Centre for Personalised Medicine (CPM), St. Anne’s College and NIHR Oxford BRC Partnership for Health, Wealth and Innovation

Panel Event

21 March, 2019 08:30

Sophie Day

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Should we prioritize PrEP for women with bacterial STI?

National HIV Prevention Conference, Atlanta, Georgia. A Debate with Dr Jonathan Zenilman,  Chief of Infectious Diseases and Professor of Medicine at Johns Hopkins, moderated by Dr Gail Bolan, Director or the Division of STD Prevention at the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention.

Lecture Event

20 March, 2019

Helen Ward

Blood & Bones: Living with Cancer

An exhibition of work by internationally exhibited and award-winning artist Tom Corby whose poignant images combine quantitative medical/clinical data describing the artist’s Multiple Myeloma* with the qualitative data generated by his personal experience of living with cancer.

Panel Event

14 March, 2019 14:00

Fiona Johnstone

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Genomic Medicine in the NHS: Promises, Politics and Practice

The recent announcement by the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care outlining aspirations to genome sequence 5 million people over the next 5 years will come as no surprise to most of us. We have known for some time that following the official completion of Genomics England 100,000 Genomes Project (100k GP), there […]

Workshop Event

9 January, 2019

Sophie Day

NCRI Cancer Conference, Glasgow

The complexity of genomic information presents challenges for health care professionals, patients and their families as they make meaning from risk information and negotiate the future. Improving genetic literacy and the effective communication of information only partially addresses the contextual way in which people make sense of information and its relevance for their lives. This […]

Panel Event

5 November, 2018 11:00 – 12:30

Sarah Cunningham-Burley, Sophie Day

Genomics in the clinic: context, care and communication

Personification Across Disciplines: An Interdisciplinary Conference at Durham University

“People Like You”: Contemporary Figures of Personalisation is a collaborative, interdisciplinary project that is exploring emergent practices of personalisation in medicine, digital culture, and data science. We argue that during the past decade innovations in recommendation, targeted commercial services, new practices of self- and collective-representation invite us to receive personalised care and education services, post selfies, […]

Panel Event

19 September, 2018

Prof. Celia Lury, Prof. Sophie Day, Dr William Viney

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Algorithmic Identities Workshop

On July 9, 2019, the first workshop of the Interdisciplinary Project “Algorithmic Identities: Issues and reactions to the collection of digital data and algorithmic inferences in everyday life” was held at Senate House, the University of London. This project is directed by researchers Martín Tironi, Matías Valderrama and Denis Parra of the Pontifical Catholic University […]

Panel Event

Competition Winners announced

We are pleased to announce the winning entries in the competition on the theme of People Like You. The three judges were Celia Lury, Martin Tironi and Nina Wakeford. They were impressed by the range of ways in which the entries responded to the provocation posed by the competition. The ‘People Like You’ project team […]

Competition Event

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Personalised medicine: the social challenges

One day launch event to a new seminar and workshop series across 2019-2020, sponsored by Centre for Personalised Medicine (CPM), St. Anne’s College and NIHR Oford BRC Partnership for Health, Wealth and Innovation The idea behind personalised medicine is both simple and powerful: delivering the right treatment to the right patient at the right time. […]

Panel Event

Sophie Day

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