Introduction

Summary

This collection began as a personal undertaking aimed at bringing together a diverse set of scholars whose work on health and technology converged on a shared objective: namely, to investigate a slice of our contemporary health-centric sociotechnical world using intersectional Science and Technology Studies (STS) methods in innovative ways. The first spark for this project came from my work on another book in which I examined the material-discursive construction of health and STS, titled Health Apps, Genetic Diets and Superfoods: When Biopolitics Meets Neoliberalism. In the course of writing that book, I discovered a flourishing ecosystem of new and exciting research examining what being in ‘good health’ means for individuals and communities and how this intersects with more contemporary notions of well-being in light of technological change, increasing medicalization and biomedicalization, and controversies around care, access, sovereignty and justice (Henry, Oliver and Winters, 2019; Hatch, 2020; Kolopenuk, 2020; Flore, 2021; Lupton and Willis, 2021).

Also of note was how health, under the conditions of a pandemic, had taken on a new valence – one that thematized the depths of our relations with other humans, non-humans and artefacts (inclusive of technologies). It also marked, as Moya Bailey and Whitney Peoples contend, a reconceptualization of health as ‘both a desired state of being and a social construct necessary of interrogation because race, gender, able-bodiedness, and other aspects of cultural production profoundly shape our notions of what is healthy’ (Baily and Peoples, 2017, p 3). While not all the chapters in this volume take on health as discourse and embodied state of being, each, in its own way, weaves together compelling narratives and performs agential cuts into our mutating techno-scientific and health assemblages in novel and exciting ways (Barad, 2007).

In light of these revelations, in drafting a proposal and sending out a call for submissions, I made it clear that my objective in inviting contributors and soliciting chapters was to use the book to engage in conversations with a diverse set of scholars whose commitment to heterogeneous scholarship was not only reflected in the thinkers they draw on, but also their methods, choice of case studies, writing styles and intentions.