Algorithms in Health and Medicine: Sociological Inquiries into Current Disruptions and Future Imaginaries

This special issue aims to expand the sociological theorising of digital transformations in health care and medicine, focusing specifically on algorithmic (including AI and data-driven) technologies. We seek papers that will address increasingly important, and yet still emergent, matters of concern in the provision of healthcare and medicine and imaginaries of their futures. It is highly significant because advances in processing power and big data gathered through miniaturised sensors, advanced robotics, chatbots, and the Internet of Things, are contributing to an expansive range of algorithmic capabilities. Trained from big datasets, deep learning algorithms can recognise patterns and detect clinically relevant features in imaging data beyond what can be perceived by the human eye. In this way, algorithms have become important diagnostic agents in radiology, oncology, and reproductive medicine. Precision medicine is being rolled out with enormous investments in many countries, whereby algorithmic capabilities provide the basis for interpreting the patient’s genetic makeup to predict or diagnose diseases (such as cancer) and determine appropriate treatments. Through natural language processing capabilities, algorithms are being employed as conversational agents and increasingly utilised in therapeutic support for patients with depression and anxiety. For example, the Woebot app, operating on the principles and practices of cognitive behavioural therapy, walks users through a series of questions to understand their mental health problems and provide them with coping strategies. Algorithms are also beginning to understand context and, thereby, can adapt the interface of electronic health records to help clinicians focus on information relevant for the specific patient. The field of algorithmic medicine is rapidly expanding towards new areas such as examining facial micro-expressions to detect pain among people with dementia and neurological problems, mining genome data to identify severity risk of COVID infection, and the provision of the artificial pancreas to automate insulin dispensary in diabetes care.

The increasing utilisation of algorithms within practices of health and medicine opens up a range of sociologically important questions. We are looking for papers that will draw together a range of theoretical, methodological and empirical resources that will offer a powerful understanding of the knowledge practices, interactive encounters and forms of agency emerging through the application of algorithms in health and medicine. Lines of inquiry could include – but are not limited to – the following:

1. How do medical algorithms reconfigure perception, meaning, and knowledge practices? This line of sociological inquiry acknowledges that algorithmic systems are performative and construct the very characteristics and descriptions of the phenomena they are purported to measure. From this backdrop, sociological investigations can trace the ways in which new images of health, perceptions of bodies, and medical expertise are brought into being through data-intensive infrastructures and algorithmic visions. Sociological studies following inscriptions in code and design can also reveal algorithmic bias, leading to discrimination and the reproduction of inequalities in health.
2. What contributions may sociology make to our understanding of the communicative or interactive performance of algorithms?
   This line of sociological inquiry accounts for algorithms as partners in communicative practices that produce and circulate information for treatment and care. Sociological studies of algorithmic encounters can provide an understanding of how clinicians and patients deal with computational outputs and reconfigure practices of health/medicine.
3. How can sociology provide an understanding of agencies emerging through algorithmic assemblages?
   This line of sociological inquiry challenges conceptions of algorithms as self-contained computational tools and asks how agentic capabilities are produced through associations between social and material agencies (e.g. imaginaries, policies, sensors, therapists, patients, etc.).
4. By what means can sociologists engage in the orchestration of desirable, ethical, and responsible forms of algorithm-driven health technologies and systems?
   This line of inquiry questions how sociologists can take up responsibility for innovation and the articulation of alternative worldings (Haraway 2016). It scrutinises different forms of intervention through which sociology can contribute and collaborate in the governance and design of algorithms and their accompanying infrastructures. These questions are particularly important for ensuring that the special issue includes a focus on the policy and practice implications of the research being discussed.

These important academic insights will be facilitated, in part, by interdisciplinary papers that work at the boundaries of sociology and other cognate disciplines – including but not limited to computer science, organisation studies, medicine, and psychology – to better understand the complex processes at work at the sites of emergence, application, and use of algorithmic technologies in various health and medical settings.

We particularly encourage contributions from, and will endeavour to work with, researchers based in the Global South, early-career researchers, and independent researcher-activists. While recognising that most research on this topic is currently concentrated in the Global North, algorithmic health and medical applications are being introduced globally, and the specificities of such applications and their impacts on local health and medical systems and cultures will be an important focus of this special issue.

Submission Guidelines

This Special Issue follows the following timeline:

1. Prospective authors are asked to submit a 600-word proposal abstract to Benjamin Marent by 6^th of January 2025. Abstracts should indicate the proposed paper’s sociological importance and include names, institutional affiliations and contact details of author(s)
2. Decisions will be sent by 31^st of January 2025
3. Paper submissions are due 1^st of July 2025

If unsure about the appropriateness of your contribution, please contact the guest editors Benjamin Marent, Flis Henwood, Alan Petersen and Barbara Barbosa Neves

Contact 

Benjamin Marent 
b.marent(at)sussex.ac.uk 

Flis Henwood
f.henwood(at)brighton.ac.uk 

Alan Petersen
alan.petersen(at)monash.edu 

Barbara Barbosa Neves
Barbara.barbosaneves(at)sydney.edu.au 

Call for Papers (Link)