Data Worlds and Futures: Archives, Bioinformation and Evidence

This Wellcome Trust Small Research Grant-funded project led by Dr EJ Gonzalez-Polledo and Dr Silvia Posocco (Birkbeck) explores the relation between bioinformation, infrastructures and evidence in relation to forensic archival practices and data processing.

As body fragments, tissue samples and DNA sequences are progressively transformed into highly mobile and replicable data, bioinformation, that is, information obtained from or about living organisms, raises urgent questions about the entanglement of (life and) death with the materialities and mechanisms of data worlds. This project explores the relation between bioinformation, infrastructures and evidence through a programme of research activities which will involve experts and practitioners in a research network, and produce a new research agenda through collaborative workshops and anthropological research.

This project will open up major areas of enquiry that will improve public understandings of evidence intersecting of forensic science, genetic profiling, and algorithmic processing and foster new avenues in bioinformation research, data policy and algorithmic governance in the field of health and wellbeing.

People 

Dr Elena Gonzalez-Polledo FHEA

Elena is a social anthropologist whose work often pushes boundaries between traditional academic disciplines.
For more information please see Elena's staff profile. 

Email: e.gonzalez-polledo (@gold.ac.uk)

Dr Silvia Posocco

Silvia works in the Department of Psychosocial Studies at Birkbeck, University of London.
For more information please see Silvia's staff profile. 

Email: s.posocco@bbk.ac.uk