Within the ongoing disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic, technologically mediated health surveillance programs have vastly intensified and expanded to new spaces. Popular understandings of medical and health data protections came into question as a variety of institutions introduced new tools for symptom tracking, contact tracing, and the management of related data. These systems have raised complex questions about who should have access to health information, under what circumstances, and how people and institutions negotiate relationships between privacy, public safety, and care during times of crisis. In this paper, we take up the case of a large public university working to keep campus productive during COVID-19 through practices of placemaking, symptom screeners, and vaccine mandate compliance databases. Drawing on a multi-methods study including thirty-eight interviews, organizational documents, and discursive analysis, we show where and for whom administrative care infrastructures either misrecognized or torqued (Bowker and Star 1999) the care relationships that made life possible for people in the university community. We argue that an analysis of care—including the social relations that enable it and those that attempt to hegemonically define it—opens important questions for how people relate to data they produce about their bodies as well as to the institutions that manage them. Furthermore, we argue that privacy frameworks that rely on individual rights, essential categories of “sensitive information,” or the normative legitimacy of institutional practices are not equipped to reveal how people negotiate privacy and care in times of crisis.

Purpose The development of the Northern VA and the Washington, DC metro area as a key node in the globalizing digital urban system is well established. This essay investigates the growth of that technological geography in the 1990s and 2000s as a part of the planetary epoch of human transformation that some have called the “Plantationocene” (vs. Anthropocene). Approach A historical and critical interpretive analysis of race, landscape, and technology policy in the Northern VA area. Findings The paper establishes the region’s social attachments to its “bucolic” agrarian landscape, rooted in the US Civil War and vast inequalities of the reimposition of the plantation as an “afterlife of slavery” after Reconstruction’s failure. It then suggests that the conditions of the plantation economy within a kind of digital plantation economy—featuring resource monopolies, extractive forms of exploitation, and monocrop “ecologies”—based on the “Server Farming” (aka, data center) industry through which some 70 % of the world’s Internet traffic flows. It looks at this digital aspect of the Plantationocene as post-Bellum and insurgent, in which the manipulation of history, the accumulation and control of ‘arable’ (digital) land, and the dispossession of social processes under quasi-feudalistic property rights encourage unequal, unsustainable, and often violent cultures and political ecologies. Practical implications Researchers considering digital urbanism might use this approach to understand online and offline geographies of the contemporary media industry. Social implications It treats the contemporary anti-government and ethno-nationalist movements growing in digital mediation as part of a much longer and unsettled planetary conflict over the plantation system, racialized social inequality, and the abolition of slavery. Originality/value While some work on “data colonialism” implicitly connects digital urbanism to the mostly agriculturally-focused work on the Plantationocene, this essay makes the connection explicit, place-based in specific historical-geographical contexts, and focused on the roles of specific political economic actors.

What does it mean to call something complex? This Review essay describes three recent books which take up complex problems and the problem of complexity: philosopher Angela Potochnik’s Idealization and the Aims of Science (2017); science and technology studies (STS) scholar Nicole Nelson’s Model Behavior: Animal Experiments, Complexity, and the Genetics of Psychiatric Disorders (2018); and historian of science Bruno Strasser’s Collecting Experiments: Making Big Data Biology (2019). Taken together, these works lay out a refreshed analytic vocabulary and set of guiding concerns for thinking about what complexity is and does in medical research, and how complexity mediates public participation in science and medicine.