Dear colleagues,
We invite you to submit an abstract to the panel “Biometric Assemblages in Medicine and Healthcare” at the Medical Anthropology Europe Conference 2025. The MAE conference will take place on 16–19 September 2025 at the University of Vienna (hybrid).
Panel Description: Biometric Assemblages in Medicine and Healthcare
Conveners: Sofie Kronberger, Paul Trauttmansdorff
Conference stream: Medicine and Technologies
Abstract:
The assessment of bodies through measurements has played a critical role in medicine and healthcare. Biometrics have established regimes of evaluation designed to surveil, analyze, and categorize these bodies. These technologies of objectification have been fundamental in producing classificatory systems, values, and standards, which have also fostered discrimination, marginalization, and violence in medicine and healthcare. Nonetheless, they are currently gaining significance in medical settings, driven by the digitalization and automation of personalized medicine and digital health.
Medical biometrics include emotion detection, voice analysis, retinal scans, fingerprinting, face recognition, and skin screening. While such technologies often promise groundbreaking solutions and transformative visions of cure, they also present significant challenges. They reflect economic inequalities, reinforce normative ideals and assumptions about bodies, raise data protection concerns, introduce racial/gender bias, have psychological and social impacts, or reinforce epistemic and historical injustices.
Our panel invites contributions that reflect diverse research approaches and analyses of biometric medicine and healthcare. We aim to investigate biometric assemblages shaped by datafication, automation, and algorithmic processing while emphasizing the need for ethnographic research and qualitative inquiry. Key questions may relate to
- socio-cultural promises and assumptions that underly biometric assemblages;
- shifting responsibilities and accountabilities for errors, discrimination, or bias in medical biometrics;
- historical/colonial legacies shaping biometric assemblages and their role in (de-) constructing categories of (non-)humanity and able-bodiedness;
- implications of, resistance against, and adaption to health surveillance;
- issues of privacy, autonomy, and consent;
- the role of biometrics in reinforcing/challenging inequalities in medicine and healthcare.
Submission Details
Kind regards
Sofie Kronberger and Paul Trauttmansdorff
Paul Trauttmansdorff
Department of Science, Technology and Society (STS) | Ethical Data Initiative
TUM School of Social Sciences and Technology
Technical University of Munich
paul.trauttmansdorff@tum.de
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