Encoding Mental health in little devices: Machine learning to care
Fri, 08 Apr
|IISER Thiruvananthapuram Campus, Maruthamala P. O, Vithura, Kerala 695551, India
Talk and Interactive session with Dr Claudia Lang, Associate Professor at Leipzig University.
Time & Location
08 Apr 2022, 6:15 pm – 7:45 pm IST
IISER Thiruvananthapuram Campus, Maruthamala P. O, Vithura, Kerala 695551, India
About the event
Title of the Talk: Encoding Mental health in little devices: Machine learning to care.
Date: 8th April, Friday
Time: 6:15 pm - 7:15 pm
Venue: BSB Seminar Hall.
About the speaker;
Dr. Claudia Lang, (PhD, PD, Social and Cultural Anthropology) holds a Heisenberg position at the University of Leipzig and is a research associate at the Max-Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle. Earlier she has held academic positions at the University of Munich, Münster and Leipzig. Her research focuses on health-related transformation processes and their impact on politics, ethics and care practices in globalizing societies, especially in the South Asia region. She is currently investigating the reconfiguration of mental health and care in the context of digitization. She is also the author of Depression in Kerala. Ayurveda and mental health care in the 21st century (Routledge); and co-editor of Global health for all: Knowledge, Politics, and Practices (Rutgers); and co-editor of The Movement for Global Mental Health: Critical Views from South and Southeast Asia (Amsterdam University Press).
Abstract of the talk:
Mental health and well-being have emerged as issues of concern and targets of intervention in global health. The Covid-19 pandemic has not only exacerbated the global mental health crisis but also normalized digital mental health technologies. These mental health technologies respond to these crises and afford novel ways of knowing, caring for, and controlling individuals and populations. As extensions of psychological regimes, they articulate new forms of human-technology relationships. Interventionists and entrepreneurs celebrate them as innovative technologies, developers display an obvious techno-optimism, while critics worry about surveillance, control, and technocratic governance. Using the case of an Indian produced mental health app, this presentation will discuss some of the situated assumptions designers and programmers make about the contexts or the forms of life in which these ‘band-aids’ are put to use, as well as some of their actual sociotechnical practices.