Digital health: practices and infrastructures

Benjamin Marent and Henriette Langstrup

Chapter 32 in Handbook on the Sociology of Health and Medicine, 2023, pp 504-524 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: Digital health is currently a widely used but vaguely defined term. In policy discourses as well as everyday talks it signifies emerging technologies that are increasingly adopted across various practices of health and medicine. The sociological perspective is interested in the relationship between technologies and practices as well as their orchestration within and through wider infrastructures at play. This chapter explores this relationality through a sociomaterial approach. Thereby, we elaborate an analytical notion of digital health that facilitates critical investigations of the opportunities and constraints encountered within practices of care. The concept of infrastructures traces the relation between local practices and wider ecologies of care. While often invisible, infrastructures are configuring how people participate in care. These forms of material participation shift alongside technological advances. Yet, participation is not always invited nor are technological innovations always envisioned by health providers or tech companies. At the fringes of established care infrastructures, we can observe emerging forms of digital health activism. Recognised as real utopias, health activists’ enactments can stimulate our imaginations about desirable digital health futures.

Keywords: Economics and Finance; Sociology and Social Policy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.elgaronline.com/doi/10.4337/9781839104756.00042 (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:elg:eechap:19641_32

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.e-elgar.com

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Chapters from Edward Elgar Publishing
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Darrel McCalla ().