I’m a biosocial medical anthropologist and I’m interested in gender, sex, reproduction, and technology. I like to work in collaboration and in innovative ways. I’m currently working on research projects which address to the ways that health-related data are being talked about, collected, shared, used, marketed, and managed in new ways. This includes data from electronic health and social care records, from wearable technologies, mobile phones, social media, and genomic and other omic data. Data and data-driven technologies are topics with increasingly obvious contemporary political relevance. As an ethnographer, my work makes possible a very thorough consideration of important aspects of the broader socio-cultural, historical, and political context in which health data and healthcare systems are situated.

Because I have worked with both quantitative (biological anthropological, epidemiological) and qualitative (social anthropological) methods and have been involved in research with public health-related aims as well as work which is critical of public health initiatives, I’m able to look at health-related data and technologies from more than one angle. I can understand the scientific side of health data science as a user of such data and to evaluate claims about what insights bigger ‘real world’ data can deliver from a scientific point of view. In addition, I can consider a bigger picture view that takes in society and understand that while health can be considered a good thing to promote, people’s experiences and views about data surveillance and health care systems really vary and in many places there are health inequalities along various axes, geographic, ethnic, gender, class, etc.

Our collaboration in the Kone Foundation funded ‘Technology, Ethics and Reproduction: Controversy in the Era of Normalisation’ project is an exciting one which will allow me to explore both sociology and queer bioethics in more depth. My interest in the complex ethical principle of justice drives me to think about health care and health data from the perspectives of those who might be least well-served by the systems we have now and the ones which are being built and, most importantly, to think about what it would take to make these systems more just. I hope the collaboration will offer me new ways to think and write about the ethics of health data, reproductive technologies, and health care systems.

I am also collaborating with highly skilled artists on a project called ‘Artificial intelligence, big data, and machine learning in healthcare: exhibition-situated arts-based public engagement and empirical ethics’ which will use an experimental exhibition of speculative futures to evoke ethical deliberation about aspects of health data-driven technological development. The work will be aiming to reach and influence both experts and the general public as patients and data subjects.

You can contact me at mwenza.blell[at]tuni.fi.