MeST talk by Benjamin Lipp: Chronic Interfacing: Living With Pain Through Technology

Thursday October 24th from 14.00-15.30 in room 5.0.22 at CSS, Øster Farimagsgade 5A

What is the role of digital technology in chronic living? In the face of its promise to provide guidance, data feedback, and even relief anywhere at all times, works in STS, sociology, and anthropology have pointed out the situated and highly ambivalent role of digital health technology in the management of chronic illness.

This scholarship usually organizes around two conceptual registers to account for this relationship: infrastructure and tinkering. While the former highlights how technology enables chronic living, the latter puts emphasis on the individual’s agency to adapt technology to their needs. In this talk, I argue that there is a gap in these two strands of theorizing, namely to account for the ambivalent ways in which (a) care is being delegated to increasingly black-boxed and automated devices, and (b) how these medical devices become the focal point of care themselves.

I propose the notion of chronic interfacing to understand how this complicates questions of subjectivity, temporality, and care in chronic illness management. I will develop and test this argument through an analysis of material collected during a diary study with people in the United States who use a semi-automated, wearable stimulation device to manage their pain.

Benjamin Lipp is Assistant Professor at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU). He received his doctorate in Science and Technology Studies (STS) from the Technical University of Munich in 2019. Before joining DTU in 2023, he was a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at Cornell University and the University of Hamburg.

In his work, he draws on new materialist, media studies and post-social theory to study how humans and machines interface, particularly in the domain of healthcare. In the past, he has investigated the emergence of care robotics in European policy, research, and innovation practices.

Currently, his work focuses on chronic pain and its neuro-digital management in the United States and Europe. bmili@dtu.dk