Suspicious by Design: Pandemic Surveillance, Data Publics, and Coded Injustice in South Korea
Solo-authored monograph in progress
My current book project, tentatively titled, Suspicious by Design: Surveillance Cultures in Times of Public Health Crises, critically examines South Korea’s data-driven governance of public health crisis through the cases of two infectious disease outbreaks – the 2015 MERS epidemic and COVID-19. It uncovers how data-driven epidemic surveillance—digital contact tracing, quarantine apps, and civic dashboards—were built and mobilized as new forms of policing “suspicious bodies” that threaten the nation’s health. It is about how technologies developed for public interest channel national anxieties to create an exclusive sense of belonging. In it, I draw on two years of fieldwork in South Korea, where the state incubated, developed, and deployed digital solutions to infectious disease outbreaks long before COVID-19. The book illustrates how these crisis response technologies become contested sites of nation-building where different ideas about citizenship, belonging, and national futures are negotiated.
This project has been supported by the American Association of University Women (AAUW), Rackham Predoctoral Fellowship, and the Digital Studies Institute at the University of Michigan. This monograph builds on my award-winning doctoral dissertation, which received the Best Dissertation Award from the ICA Global Communication & Social Change division, the ProQuest Distinguished Dissertation Award, and the Mark Foote Distinguished Dissertation Award from the University of Michigan.
COVID-19 Data Builders: Dashboards, Publics, and the Making of Public Health Infrastructures
Multi-authored monograph in progress
My second book project, tentatively titled COVID-19 Data Builders: Dashboards, Publics, and the Making of Public Health Infrastructures, is based on collaborative research with Megan Finn, Amelia Acker, Ryan Ellis, Janaki Srinivasan, and Bidisha Chaudhuri. As a team of international and multidisciplinary scholars in communication, information, and media studies, we are preparing a multi-authored monograph that examines the data labor behind COVID-19 public data infrastructures in the US and India. Since 2021, we have traced the rise and eventual decline of various COVID-19 dashboards that became central media of the pandemic, including official government-backed public health dashboards, large volunteer tracking projects, academic efforts, and activist interventions. These dashboards were built and maintained by small communities of data workers ranging from experienced data scientists, epidemiologists, journalists, to college students and retirees. This multi-author book project explores the people who came together to create COVID-19 data projects and the labor behind them. It reveals a complex story about belief and disillusionment in the power of data and its representational authority, and the contentious politics that engulf data infrastructures.
This project has been supported by the National Science Foundation, Omidyar Network, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Mozilla Foundation, Ford Foundation, and Open Society Foundations.