Cancellation: Please note that the replacement date will be announced later.

Zoom Link:
https://unilu.zoom.us/j/96980410248?pwd=WUVJcVZzVTgxRWpTOWtjSWp0QnMzUT09

Meeting ID: 969 8041 0248
Passcode: 500274

Devising diets differently: How to re-imagine the infrastructural arrangements of big data 

This talk is based on an interdisciplinary and international research collaboration between computer science, information management and Science and Technology Studies (STS), as well as the active inclusion of users, build around the SNSF-funded research project ‘FoodCoach’. FoodCoach develops an automated approach for the analysis of digital shopping data - based on loyalty cards of food retailers - and makes this information accessible to users via a mobile app. Parallel to the technical development and implementation, ethnographic research is being carried out to examine the lived experiences of users as well as the reservations of non-users about app-enabled dietary monitoring and intervention. At the heart of the FoodCoach project is the overarching ambition to understand how the developed app shapes eating practices and to assess the potential for preventing diet-related (future) diseases. In this talk I focus on the research project’s potential to collaboratively develop ‘alternative’ interventions, interpretations and imaginings of what digital shopping data stands for and what can be done with it, in the sense of ‘data activism’ (Milan and van der Velden 2016; Schneider et al., forthcoming). I am particularly interested in how dietary responsibilities are shifted, or can be shifted, and what possibilities consumers have to act in so-called ‘data assemblages’ (Kitchin and Lauriault, 2015).