Written Portraits is a collection of poems by Di Sherlock drawn from conversations with patients and staff she met during a residency at Charing Cross Hospital’s breast cancer services and Maggie’s West London. Written Portraits is part of the ‘People Like You’ project on personalisation at Imperial College London, Goldsmiths University of London and Warwick […]
Sophie Day presented findings from interviews associated with the RIO Trial. She and Will Viney have talked to people living with HIV who have and have not joined the RIO trial as well as members of the community and staff working on RIO. To find out more about this research study, visit the What We […]
Sophie Day presented emerging findings from our sub-study of the RIO Trial to an in-person and online group of trial participants and other people associated with the trial. We have interviewed 10 trial participants twice and a further 15+ participants, non-participants, staff and members of the HIV community. To find out more about this research […]
We provided NHS staff and researchers feedback on our work on personalised breast cancer medicine. By refering to current and future publications, we divided our findings based on changes in practices in the last 5 years, the coordination of care and research activities, impacts of COVID-19, and the exploratory involvement of patients and staff in […]
Hear the stories of patients and staff at a typical London hospital, told through the written portraits of Di Sherlock She shrugs off the memory like a scratchy sweater or an old skin, says cancer is one more curve ball Life’s thrown her way. Written Portraits is a collection of poems by Di Sherlock drawn […]
Sophie Day presented findings from interviews associated with the RIO Trial. She and Will Viney have talked to people living with HIV who have and have not joined the RIO trial as well as members of the community and staff working on RIO. To find out more about this research study, visit the What We […]
The ‘People Like You’ research project is proud to launch the series, Figure to Ground: Dialogic Portraits by the artist Felicity Allen. In her residency for the project, Allen produced a series of portraits, curated in the on-line exhibition Rooms, and a film, Figure to Ground – a site losing its system. Her work draws […]
A one-day event on the theme of personalisation, presenting research and artworks in health, data science and digital cultures. You can read about the day on our blog, ‘These shoes that follow you round the internet’ and you can watch a video highlight of the day, Programme 11.00 – 13:00 Portraits of ‘People Like You’: […]
Two works from Felicity Allen’s Dialogic Portraits series with People Like You: Contemporary Figures of Personalisation are in Harry Pye’s R.A. Summer Show at The Front Room, Ramsgate, 20 August – 12 September 2021.
‘People Like You’ hosted a small workshop exploring a new political arithmetic that puts data in dynamic relation through tracking, analysis, and feedback. Beginning with an overview from our project we then heard from scholars who have inspired our thinking. You can read more about the workshop in Scott Wark’s blog, and you can also […]
On Wednesday 11 November, we hosted the launch of Di Sherlock’s Written Portraits hosted by Sophie Day with Di Sherlock, and Kelly Gleason. Di talked to people at Maggie’s West London and Charing Cross Hospital in London who are affected by, and working with, cancer. Her poetry practice involves writing a ‘portrait’ from these conversations. She then gives […]
We’re drowning in an ocean of data, or so the saying goes. Data’s “big”: there’s not only lots of it, but its volume has allowed for the development of new, large-scale processing techniques. Our relationship with governments, medical organisations, technology companies, the education sector, and so on are increasingly informed by the data we overtly […]
Have you ever been told ‘People like you like things like this’? Recommendations that come in this form are examples of personalisation. Personalisation practices address you as an individual with unique tastes and preferences, whilst simultaneously saying you are similar to other people. Maybe you are ‘like’ someone else because you ‘like’ the same things. Maybe […]
In recent years we have seen a sharp increase in techniques, practices, and ideologies that seek to ‘personalise’ products and services. ‘People Like You’: Contemporary Figures of Personalisation is a project that has received funding from the Wellcome Trust to track what this move towards personalisation really means. While there is a rapidly growing literature […]
The People Like You Project has launched a website for their ‘Algorithmic Identities’ project. In collaboration with researchers from the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Algorithmic Identities aims to contribute to the social studies of data and algorithms using a ‘prototype’ recommendation app called ‘Big Sister.’ The aim of our project is to investigate […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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.
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Who are we online? On the ‘Digital Subject’** and online personhood.
Archive-A-Alive! A Symposium Exploring the Tavistock Institute’s Archive, St. Luke’s Community Centre.
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 […]
4S: Society for the Social Study of Science, New Orleans. Collaborative work with Thao Phan, Research Fellow, University of Deakin: co-organised panel.
Symposium, AIDS Impact 14th International Conference London, 29-31 July 2019.
Health Research Matters Seminar, Imperial College London Inventions Rooms, London.
STI and HIV 2019 World Congress, Vancouver, 14-17 July 2019.
Pre-Congress Symposium on Phase Specific Strategies for STI and HIV Control Redux: Resurgence, concentrations, networks, key populations, and magic bullets, Vancouver.
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, […]
ASE’s 31st Annual-Meeting, New School for Social Research, New York.
Digital⇌Culture, University of Nottingham.
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 […]
Academic Brands workshop, UC Davis.
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
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.
Aesthetic Seminar, Aarhus University.
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.
NIHR Biomedical Research Centres in Oncology Workshop, Royal College of Nursing.
Report
Talk to Cancer Research UK (CRUK) National Nurses meeting.
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 […]
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 […]
“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, […]
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 […]
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 […]
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. […]