Workshop

What is the future of hospital care in a time of paradigm shift in the healthcare sector provoked by Artificial Intelligence (AI)? What will be or become of the hospital as an idea, a project and a technological infrastructure; and why or how should we care about its future in a time of Big data and algorithms? Highly technoscientific promises weigh heavily in future projections, with digitalisation and AI solutions appearing as the new salvation. This salvation is particularly championed by international consulting firms whose speculations dominate the narrative of a future shaped by AI-driven hospital medicine, with the African continent as its new benevolent target. But how is the global AI project shifting the idea, form and operation of the hospital in Africa? How is AI translated or made tangible in the health medical sphere – if at all, and where?
 
In this project, we wish to critically interrogate the technological shifts that AI can bring to care, and particularly hospital care, by mapping and scrutinising the ethical quandaries or dilemmas that the euphoria for AI activates in a continent deemed to be at the frontiers of transformative AI. How do AI development projects translate and interpret care and ethics into new technologies? Firstly, we will ask: what is AI in a hospital and healthcare context and where is it to be found? How is it understood? And made sense of? What are the gaps? How is AI technology and innovation discussed? We will map the imaginaries and the concrete technologies/ technoscapes of AI in hospitals, labs, health science, and care interactions, as well as in the movement of drones, production of drugs and vaccines, activation of machines, diagnosis and datasets, amongst others. Secondly, we seek to understand what and how these new developments are shifting patient care, diagnosis, follow-up, patient flow, health work and data management? How is the conversation about care changing? Where is human intelligence challenged or completed by artificial intelligence? What methods and theories are we using to investigate and challenge these ethical quandaries?
 
We approach the hospital as a place from which to think through the implications of futuristic technologies – in this case AI – in the African context and globally, their impact on modes of being, and their articulations with low-tech interventions into social problems. We foreground epistemic questions and seek methodological options for future collaborative and publicly engaged projects. We take Africa as a place from which to think critically about the contemporary world and what being human means. We aim to produce creative and publicly engaged research as well as academic scholarship. 

Objectives

  • Constitute a core group of young scholars and strengthen a network (after the Future Hospital Ethnography post-ASAA workshop in Cape Town in April 2022 and the Hospital Imaginaries ECAS Panel in May 2023)
  • Build an Exchange program between South Africa/Africa and France/Europe and Beyond (Brazil, Cuba), which aims to push the boundaries of what constitutes hospitals all over the world, with regards to imperatives of human dignity and social justice and thinking from the South.
  • Support the production of innovative content and engagement with the public at large: share intersectional insights, community-public oriented, ex: illustrated texts, long formats, podcasts.
  • Publication: The final outcome will be a Journal special issue or an Edited volume

Deadlines

  • 30 September 2024: Op-ed draft (300 words)  
  • 25 October 2024: Article draft (1000 words)
  • 4–8 November 2024: Cape Town workshop

Workshop convenors

Divine Fuh (HUMA UCT)
Fanny Chabrol (IRD/CEPED)

Supported by:

Carnegie Corporation of New York and the National Research Foundation (NRF)

Funded by:

Partenariat Hubert Curien PROTEA – South Africa/France Science and Technology Research Collaboration, National Research Foundation (NRF), Carnegie Corporation of New York, Wenner-Gren Foundation and the Global Research Institute of Paris (GRIP)

Key readings for this event

Benjamin, R. (2019). Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the new Jim Code. Polity.

Besteman, C. & Gusterson, H. (eds) (2019). Life by Algorithms: How Roboprocesses are Remaking our World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Büyüm, A., Kenney, M., Koris, A., Mkumba, L. & Raveendran, Y. (2020). Decolonising global health: if not now, when? BMJ Global Health, 5(8), e003394. doi: 10.1136/bmjgh-2020-003394.

Birhane, A., & van Dijk, J. (2020). Robot Rights? Let’s Talk about Human Welfare Instead. Proceedings of the AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society, 207–213. https://doi.org/10.1145/3375627.3375855.

Chabrol, F. & Kehr, J. (2020). ‘The hospital multiple: introduction’, Somatosphere (blog), 17 November. Available at: http://somatosphere.net/2020/hospital-multiple-introduction.html.

Escobar, A. (1995). Anthropology and the future: New technologies and the reinvention of culture. Futures, 27(4), pp.409-421.

Fuh, D. (2019). Bending over Backwards: Dismantling Toxic ‘Opportunities’. Journal of African Cultural Studies, 31(3): 264‑67. https://doi.org/10.1080/13696815.2019.1630260.

Gebru, T. (2019). Oxford Handbook on AI Ethics, book chapter on Race and Gender. arXiv:1908.06165. arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.1908.06165.

Gusterson, H. (2016). Drone: remote control warfare. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Hao, K. (2019). The future of AI research is in Africa’, Technology Review, 21. doi: 10.1186.

Ho, K. (2009). Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street. Duke University Press.

Iyer, N., Chair, C. & Achieng, G. (2023). ‘Afrofeminist data futures’, in Browne, J. and others (eds) Feminist AI: critical perspectives on algorithms, data, and intelligent machines. Oxford: Oxford Academic. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192889898.003.0020 (Accessed: 15 August 2024).

Noble, S. (2018). Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism. NYU Press.

O'neil, C. (2017). Weapons of math destruction: How big data increases inequality and threatens democracy. Crown.

Olsen, W.C. & Sargent, C. (2022). The work of hospitals: global medicine in local cultures. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Raji, I.D. (2020). Handle with care: lessons for data science from Black female scholars. Patterns, 1(8), 100150. doi: 10.1016/j.patter.2020.100150.

Sallstrom, L. Morris, O. & Mehta, H. (2019). Artificial intelligence in Africa’s healthcare: ethical considerations. ORF Issue Brief, no 312.

Sanabria, E., 2023. ‘Futures’, in Fotta, M., McCallum, C. and Posocco, S. (eds). Cambridge Handbook of Gender and Sexuality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Seaver, N. (2017). Algorithms as culture: Some tactics for the ethnography of algorithmic systems. Big Data & Society, 4(2), p.2053951717738104.

Sigounas, V.Y. (2024). Technologies of care and the engineering imaginary: Two approaches to assistive device design for the Global South. Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 38(1), pp.40-53.