No abstract

El presente texto analiza cómo makers en México usaron prototipos en la implementación y manejo de redes de suministro para la fabricación de caretas para personal de primera línea durante los primeros meses de la pandemia. En conversación con teorías de la información y los estudios feministas de ciencia y tecnología, el texto sostiene que dichos prototipos tuvieron tres funciones comunicativas: (1) organizar el trabajo en un contexto de distancia social (Suchman et al., 2002; Valentine, 2013); (2) gestionar la incertidumbre con respecto a la información de salud contradictoria (Corsín Jiménez, 2014; Lindtner, 2020); y (3) articular procesos de innovación y producción de valor de mercado (Beckert, 2016; Eisenhardt, 1989). Esta triple función comunicativa de los prototipos hizo posible la articulación de prácticas cívicas y lógicas neoliberales, lo que llamo, siguiendo a otros autores, la economización de la participación cívica (Lindtner, 2020; Murphy, 2017).

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.