Mobile health apps have emerged as a technological fix promising to improve asthma management. In the United States, treatment non-adherence has become the most pressing asthma risk; as such, emphasis has increasingly focused on getting asthmatics to take medications as prescribed. In this article I examine how mobile Asthma (mAsthma) apps operate as part of digital risk society, where mobile apps create new modes of risk identification and management; promise to control messy and undisciplined subjects and care practices; use algorithms to generate new risk calculations; and make risk livelier through digital assemblages. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, content analysis of mAsthma app design, as well as interviews with app developers, in this article I argue that these digital care technologies strip disease and risk of biographical, ecological and affective detail in ways that largely reinforce biomedical paradigms. Yet some apps offer new insight into the place-based dynamics of environmental health, a view made possible with digitised personal tracking, visual analytics and crowdsourced data. mAsthma apps are caught in the tension between the biopolitics of existing chronic care infrastructure, which reinforce a strict neoliberalised patient responsibility, and the promise of collective, place-based approaches to global environmental health problems.
I am an anthropologist trained in the interdisciplinary field of Science and Technology Studies (STS). I specialize in the study of contemporary health practices, and how biomedical science and emerging technologies shape the way we understand and care for chronic disease conditions.
My research and teaching focus on 1) environmental health and the politics of care, 2) the spaces in which health and disease are produced (homes, cities, clinics, and public health networks), and 3) how embodied experiences of health and disease are technologically mediated. My current research examines the experiences of asthmatics and how asthma is cared for across different U.S. contexts; my analysis focuses on the ethical and epistemic problems surrounding environmental health conditions.
As an instructor, my seminars are organized around the complex medical, environmental, and technological problems that require interdisciplinary research and analysis. Students learn to evaluate knowledge claims to gain understanding of scientific controversies, the politics of technology, and the social organization of medical research, for example. I am committed to helping students develop the capacity for research, and I look forward to teaching STS courses on health, medicine, the body, and feminist theory as a new faculty member at Drexel.
Before joining Drexel, I was Managing Editor and Program Director at Cultural Anthropology, the journal of the Society for Cultural Anthropology. I have taught in the Department of Science and Technology Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and in the Department of Women's Studies at the University of Albany, SUNY.
