News

4S 2026 Toronto: The Global Politics of Digital Health

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Join me in Toronto for the annual 4S conference, where Dr. Luca Marelli (University of Milan), Dr. Jay Shaw (University of Toronto), Dr. Abril Saldaña-Tejeda (University of Guanajuato) and I will be hosting a panel on the global politics of digital health.

We are inviting papers that advance empirical and conceptual contributions related to health data sharing and integration. Rather than treating ‘global politics’ as a given, this panel will examine how these emerging orders are enacted, contested, and stabilized in practice.

Submit here.

Design Fictions: A Toolkit for Imagining Alternative Digital Health Futures

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Dr. Paula Rowland will be piloting a toolkit that we co-developed at the next AMS Leadership Academy on April 22, 2026.

Design Fictions is a story-driven toolkit that uses vignettes and structured prompt cards to help participants collaboratively enter, question, and re-imagine digital health worlds.

Participants engage with fictional worlds to surface the assumptions, values, and relations that shape what is understood as possible, inevitable, or desirable.

You can view the toolkit here or download it for your own use here.

Photo Credit: Paula Rowland

Colloquium in Milan, Italy: Health Data Spaces in a Global Context

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Poster Credit: Benedetta Muda

On March 10-11, 2026 the EHDS Forum will be organizing its second meeting and a public colloquium in Milan, Italy, supported by the EASST Fund.

While often framed as technical and regulatory infrastructures, emerging health data spaces constitute full-fledged political projects that reshape relations between citizens, public institutions, and commercial actors.

This colloquium foregrounds key STS and policy themes raised by health data spaces, including questions of social license, public accountability, democratic legitimacy, and public value. The event also situates these developments within broader geopolitical dynamics concerning data sovereignty, strategic autonomy, and global power asymmetries.

By adopting a comparative and conceptual lens, this colloquium invites critical reflection on the governance, imaginaries, and broader socio-political dynamics underpinning emerging health data ecosystems.