Minute/s Work: The Participation of Digital Data Objects in the Conjuncture and Disjuncture of Policy and Care

Abstract

Documentation practices form a substantial part of digital knowledge landscapes. People record their health-related experience and the course of disease and treatment in various digital formats, and health institutions use digital documentation systems to order and accomplish their diverse tasks. These processes significantly impact the ways healthcare is delivered and experienced and hence interfere with the interplay between policy and care. This chapter examines how policy and care relate in the digital health infrastructure. Based on an ethnographic study in public community mental healthcare services in Berlin in the year 2013, this chapter looks at how encounters in these facilities translate into entries in an institutional digital documentation system, how these entries travel as digital data objects and in which kind of actions they again translate. Drawing on material-semiotic theory within science and technology studies and with reference to the fields of anthropology, political science and sociology, I elaborate how such data journeys simultaneously produce conjuncture (translations into sameness) and disjuncture (translations into difference) of policy and care in the everyday routines of the services. Finally, I suggest how conjoining/disjoining policy and care through the digital infrastructure significantly shapes what it means to care and be cared for in contemporary spaces of German mental healthcare.