Crossroads in Cultural Studies Conference 14-17th December 2016 Program Index

Martin Berg
Fitness APIs as Health Data Superstructures
Wearable health technologies and fitness apps are increasingly interconnected through APIs (application
programming interface) through which data from sensors are transferred, translated and interpreted. This
paper builds on a close critical reading of the technical documentation of some of the most popular fitness
APIs (Apple HealthKit, Fitbit, HealthGraph and Withings among others) and aims at establishing an
understanding of how human bodies and their activities are conceptualised and measured as data through
APIs. Departing from these empirical readings, the paper conceptualises fitness APIs as “health data
superstructures” that to various extents render certain self-tracking and body-monitoring practices more
feasible than others. Such a conceptualisation is important since it allows for further explorations of the
limits and possibilities of how wearable technologies are designed, developed and used in conjunction with
other apps and technologies.
Minna Ruckenstein
Politics of Everyday Analytics and the Informatics-Behavioral Register
This paper situates the politics of life that the current expansion everyday analytics and related self-tracking
practices promote within “the informatics-behavioral register” (Schüll 2016) that rely on the datafication of
daily lives. The politics of life, that the informatics-behavioral regime sustain, involve a multitude of
disciplinary approaches and techniques that participate in modifying everyday action. Such modifications
rely, for instance, on nudging and gamification approaches, underlining the difficulty of converting and
translating the everyday into data-driven feedback loops in a manner that people would find appealing.
Some applications treat people like Pavlovian dogs, or human cattle, while other personal data uses open
reflexive spaces to encourage people to share and discuss aspects of their lives. The paper outlines a politics
of everyday analytics that explains this diversity by focusing on the datafication of life, covering issues
around commercialization of personal data, emerging data infrastructures and everyday data practices.
4L
Research practice and ethical engagements (Chair, Yrjö Kallinen)
Amelia Johns
Ethical researcher engagement with digital cultures of marginalised youth
Techno-utopian visions that hail the digital cultures of marginalised youth for the way they unsettle
dominant narratives and structures often overlook how power operates within social media, with problems
of who gets to define and represent marginalised voices often leading to conflict. In my current research I
engage with these tensions via a digital ethnography of the Mipsterz (“Muslim Hipsters”) online community.
The heated negotiations of faith and identity which flow through Mipsterz social media brings attention to
the challenges for marginalised youth and their media to promote inclusive public cultures. In this paper, I
want to focus on the ethical challenges that arise from researcher contact with the field. As digital
ethnography always entails ethical challenges that implicate researchers – not as objective observers but as
actors who affect the communities being researched – this may provide lessons for future research.
Ben Light, Peta Mitchell* & Patrik Wikström
Digital public sexual cultures and the ethics of location
With the rise of geo-social media, location is emerging as a particularly sensitive data point for digital media
research (Leszczynski 2015). The ethical sensitivities around location are further heightened in the context of
research into public sexual cultures – that is, research that involves the study of sexual practices in places
such as parks, shopping malls and sex clubs. In this paper, we investigate ethical considerations involved in
using digital methods to analyse a web-based geo-social platform for users seeking and contributing
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