Chiara Carboni

© Chiara Carboni

Scientific Associate

Name

Chiara Carboni MA

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Chiara Carboni is a postdoctoral researcher in Artificial Intelligence, Health and Digital Culture at Technische Universität Dresden in the Chair of Digital Cultures. Her work is situated at the intersection of Science and Technology Studies, Critical Data and Algorithm Studies, Medical Sociology, Disability Studies and Gender and Sexuality Studies. She is interested in the cultural politics of attention and filtering in the context of care automation, in the emergence of synthetic populations and the emergence of in silico clinical trials, as well as in the implications of computational psychiatry, and specifically machine listening, for questions around diagnosis, biology and identity.

Chiara is about to complete her PhD at the Erasmus School of Health Policy and Management of the Erasmus University Rotterdam. Her thesis, entitled Broken glass in the clinic: Tracing the performativity of early-stage Artificial Intelligence in clinical settings, weaves together three ethnographies conducted hospital settings that, albeit differing drastically in their patient populations and types of care provision, are all brought together by a more or less material engagement with artificial intelligence. These cases were located in a pathology department, in an intensive care unit, and in two acute psychiatric clinics, and engaged, respectively, with a the digitization of pathology diagnosis as infrastructure-making for the clinical ingression of AI; with real-time analytics mobilized in the context of workforce shortages, and with their surfacing of a kind of attention-as-care that had previously been less characteristic of nursing work; finally, with the pilot of an algorithm for the prediction of inpatient violence – a pilot that failed due to its lack of consideration of the embodied and ethical complexities nurses experiences when assessing and dealing with violence risk. In general, her PhD work details the reconfigurations taking place in clinical settings, both at the material and infrastructural and at the level of practice, even before AI’s actual implementation. It also points to the epistemic and ethical risks inherent in framing AI as a potential solution to the workforce shortages plaguing contemporary healthcare systems worldwide.

The first papers from Chiara’s thesis have appeared in Social Science & Medicine and in Social Studies of Science. Previous work can be found on the UCL Medical Anthropology blog. During her PhD, she was visiting researcher at the Copenhagen Business School, where she worked with Nanna Bonde Thylstrup. She holds an MSc in Cultures of Arts, Science & Technology from Maastricht University (NL), an MSc Medical Anthropology from University College London (UK), and a BA Italian Literature from Università di Udine (IT).

Chiara is currently working on the Horizon Scan project CYMEDSEC: Enhancing cybersecurity of connected medical devices, spearheaded by the Else Kröner Fresenius Center for Digital Health. In this project, she will be looking at social and cultural aspects of cybersecurity, pertaining especially to issues of securitization, access, and equity, with an emphasis on gender and race.