Part of the Institute for Science and Society seminar series. Followed by tea and coffee.
Dr Andrew Goffey, School of Cultures, Languages and Area Studies
Publicly presented in terms of an “information revolution,” recent transformations to the NHS in the UK are predicated on the plausibility of a rhetoric that it is difficult to oppose, at least on face value. Who could be against better, more accurate, more timely information? Who could be against transparency? Evidence? Yet alongside the rhetoric (typically also accompanied by the virtues of “disruptive” technology and the necessity of “culture change”), significant transformations in the technical infrastructures of communication and cooperation are occurring that pose major questions about how to understand not just healthcare but also the social relations that are constituted in and through information. Framing the kinds of changes that are underway in the NHS in terms of informatisation, privatisation, neoliberalisation or even globalisation seem obvious moves, yet references to such broad concepts typically leave out of their accounts the work of infrastructures: they direct our attention elsewhere.
Drawing on a research project in progress, this paper seeks to address the political work of infrastructures in the NHS. Thinking through the notion of “infrastructural inversion” as a way to think, in particular, about the construction of data and information in particular, I will argue for the importance of exploring critically the processes constitutive of these otherwise rather nebulous terms and develop some ideas about the importance of differentiating between technical and knowledge practices when trying to understand the politics of infrastructures.