Sophie Bennani-Taylor

The proliferation of digital tools in public health has spurred the emergence of ‘digital health’, a term encompassing the varied technologies that utilise digital media to manage illness and support wellbeing (Lupton, 2022). Meanwhile, the rise of One Health as an influential public health paradigm – and with it the idea that animals, humans, and the environment form an interdependent system that should be governed in a coordinated, interdisciplinary manner to secure positive health for all – has contributed to new technologies that seek to monitor and manage disease emergence across species lines (Braverman, 2022). Despite this ambition, much geographical analysis has argued that digital health interventions are anthropocentric, attending to non-humans through modes of surveillance and datafication in so much as they represent a risk to human health, furthering an unequal public health paradigm that leaves little space for local contingency and the wants and needs of non-human actors (Hinchliffe, 2015; Lupton, 2022). Nevertheless, recent geographical work channeling more affirmative ‘digital ecologies’ approaches to the digitisation of more-than-human relations has considered how digital technologies also cultivate understanding of and responsiveness to how pathogens, disease vectors, reservoirs, and environments in specific contexts are implicated in and impacted by disease emergence, throwing light on how digitisation may reconfigure disease ecologies to enable life in less-pathological configurations (Turnbull, 2022; Kirkham, 2026).

Expanding on understandings of digitisation as a process that materially configures disease ecologies to produce programmes of biopolitical intervention, intersubjective experiences of illness and wellbeing, and uneven health outcomes across species lines, this panel interrogates how digital technologies are shaping whose, and what, health is made to matter across diverse contexts. How can we merge digital geographies and health geography scholarship to apprehend the digital mediation of illness and wellbeing? What happens when digital health technologies are inserted into unequal health geographies? How do these technologies reconfigure the topologies of more-than-human relations that drive disease emergence? And how may digital health technology sediment or open taken-for-granted understandings of public health? We are interested in papers answering: • The role of digital technology in practices of biosecurity and disease surveillance at the human-animal-environment nexus, including the ways in which processes of digital datafication, visualisation, and mapping alter how disease situations are apprehended and acted within; • how digital health technologies mediate the experiential dimensions of human-non-human encounter in the context of disease governance; • the political economies of digital disease governance and the role of digital technologies in challenging or supporting pathological industries; • the role of digital technologies as they operate within agro-industrial and veterinary sectors, and the consequences this has for labour, care practices, and more-than-human health; • how material infrastructures of the digital, such as data centres, chip production, and e-waste, are implicated in disease emergence and environmental health; • how digital technologies may or may not transform conventional public health approaches to facilitate the assembly of ‘healthy publics’ or a ‘more-than-One Health’ agenda (Hinchliffe, 2015; Hinchliffe et al., 2018).

Ray Chan and I are convening a panel at the upcoming RGS-IBG 2026 conference titled "Digital Disease Ecologies of More-than-Human Health". Please see the abstract below, and if you are interested in attending send george.kirkham@sjc.ox.ac.uk a 250 word abstract with a short bio by the 23rd Feb

Pleased to share my article examining how circulations of data, capital, and discourse shape migrants' im/mobilities through the case of the UK's ASPEN Card – proudly in Ulla Berg, Carolina Sánchez Boe & @dbyler.bsky.social's SI in @survstudiesnet.bsky.social

ojs.library.queensu.ca/index.php/su...

Making sense of snakebite: the place of biological toxins in social scientific analyses of toxicity - BioSocieties Through an ethnographic study of snakebite governance in Kerala, India, this article argues that social scientific theories of toxicity elucidate the biosocial dimensions of snakebite envenomation (SB...

Pleased to share this paper for BioSocieties on snakebite in Kerala. I explore how social scientific theories of toxicity aid in conceiving of the structural vulnerabilities, diagnostic uncertainty, and multispecies health impacts that characterise snakebite's public health response.

Ban asylum seekers who work illegally from gaining refugee status, Tories say The Conservatives say the UK's informal working market is acting as a "pull factor" for small boat crossings in the Channel.

Once more for those at the back. Working as an undocumented delivery drive is not a "pull factor". People are not risking their lives crossing the channel to work for Deliveroo.
Doing so is an outcome of the system once people are here.
1/2 #r4today

news.sky.com/story/ban-as...

"Nearly half of white students admitted to Harvard between 2009 and 2014 were legacy students or Dean’s Interest List—a list of applicants whose relatives have donated to Harvard, the existence of which only became public knowledge in 2018"

75% of them would not have been admitted otherwise

“those who need help cooking a meal would qualify, but those who are able to use a microwave would not.

Needing help to wash your hair or the lower half of your body would not be sufficient to qualify, but requiring help to wash your upper body would.”

Absurd quantification of disability

All the ways disability benefit rules could be tightened in DWP crackdown — The i Paper The eligibility rules for PIP and universal credit are set to be tightened

‘Cracking down’ on a system which already makes it almost impossible for disabled people to access financial support

apple.news/Ad-rjWUoHQNe...

I'm incredibly pleased to share that I'll be speaking alongside Dr Janaki Srinivasan, whose work I really admire, at this year's Merton Equality Conversation on 'Inclusions and Exclusions in the Data Age'. You can book tickets here if you're in/around Oxford www.merton.ox.ac.uk/event/inclus...

OII | Global Southing Internet, Data and AI Studies Workshop This workshop aims to facilitate dialogues between UK scholars and approaches from the Global South in the field of Internet and Data Studies.

Registration open and Call for Abstracts, Global Southing Internet, Data and AI Studies workshop. University of Oxford, March 25-26. www.oii.ox.ac.uk/news-events/...

A view from inside Israel: The closure of the Dublin embassy is a distraction tactic Israel is a diplomatic bully and never addresses its human rights abuses. Global focus should not be on etiquette but on freedom for Palestine

“What Israel is doing to Palestinians is not its own domestic problem, nor is it a minor or passing crisis; it is one of the most horrific, ongoing, large-scale human rights abuses of this century (and much of the previous one) The international community should do more”

Developing a Framework for Collective Data Rights Data protection law and policy are founded on the approach of individual notice and consent — an approach with shortcomings in an age of big data and artificial intelligence. This special reports cons...

🚨 Desperate for some Xmas reading? CIGI have published my report on "Developing a Framework for Collective Data Rights".

This report aims to get concrete about the kinds of collective rights we might need to address group and societal harms from data and AI.

🧵

www.cigionline.org/publications...

More than 140 Kenya Facebook moderators diagnosed with severe PTSD Exclusive: Diagnoses part of lawsuit being brought against parent company Meta and outsourcer Samasource Kenya

"In Kenya, it traumatised 100% of hundreds of former moderators tested for PTSD … In any other industry, if we discovered 100% of safety workers were being diagnosed with an illness caused by their work, the people responsible would be forced to resign..."

www.theguardian.com/media/2024/d...

Hi, would love to join the list :) working on digital ID from an STS perspective

Gurbaksh might also be in Ipswich so if you’re in London or Ipswich please please keep your eyes peeled and reshare if possible 🙏

Long shot, but if anyone happens to have seen my friend Gurbaksh (also goes by Simon) in/around London, or can provide information that can help, please please get in touch.

Would also appreciate if this can be shared more widely.

Data is never ‘collected’, it is only *generated*.

This isn’t merely a pedantic semantic gripe; by misrepresenting ‘data’ as something that exists in nature & has only to be scooped up, evasion of accountability for data harms has already begun

Data doesn’t exist until someone constructs it

An (unexpected) perk of doing research in India: your lovely friends and colleagues make you street food your weak stomach couldn’t otherwise handle so you don’t miss out 🥰

👋 new followers.

I’m Sophie, a PhD student at the OII looking at government digital ID systems.

I mostly take an STS-based approach to research and run an (online) STS reading group based out of Oxford - please message if you’re interested in joining!

Israel’s Crimes Against Humanity in Gaza Israeli authorities have caused the massive, deliberate forced displacement of Palestinian civilians in Gaza since October 2023 and are responsible for war crimes and crimes against humanity, Human Ri...

NEW: Israeli authorities have caused massive, deliberate forced displacement of Palestinian civilians in Gaza since October 2023 and are responsible for war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Governments should adopt targeted sanctions and other measures, and halt weapons sales to Israel.

🥳🥳 congrats!