critical data sense

This project investigates the relationships between sensing, data, affect, responsibility and technologies in health care settings, and how they shape the experience of giving and receiving care. We are interested in modelling the complex, historically and politically grounded, and technologically oriented experiences of care, and the implications for medical education and critical technoscientific literacies.


These relationships constitute the sensorium of medicine. We seek to understand moral and ethical horizons within this sensorium (in the time of COVID), while also re-imagining what can be felt and perceived in the medical sensorium. We use sociologically, historically and educationally anchored approaches with a core emphasis on modelling

The project is anchored by critical phenomenology. Experience is not universal; rather some ways of feeling and perceiving are privileged while others are silenced or excluded. 

Our work is transdisciplinary. It builds on and contributes to the fields of sociology of knowledge, learning sciences and medicine, while also advancing scholarship in critical computing and medical education. We employ empirical, theoretical and artistic approaches to model moral horizons.


Moral Horizons: Modelling Pain, With People

PIs Ariel Ducey and Pratim Sengupta, along with PhD scholar Santanu Dutta delivered an invited lecture on our ongoing research at Vanderbilt University in March 2021. In this talk, they introduce the notion of moral horizons and emplace it within a decolonized vision of translation and complexity. 

Funded by a New Frontiers in Research Fund (NFRF) - Exploration Grant, administered by the Tri-agency Institutional Programs Secretariat, housed within the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), Canada.  


Website initially designed by Basak Helvaci Ozacar. Original drawings by Santanu Dutta. Additional content and design by Ariel Ducey and Pratim Sengupta.