Building Grassroots Infrastructures, Enacting Professionalism. Exploring the
Nexus of Knowledge Production, Technology and Medical Professionalism in
Times of Epistemic Uncertainty.
Building Grassroots Infrastructures, Enacting Professionalism. Exploring the
Nexus of Knowledge Production, Technology and Medical Professionalism in
Times of Epistemic Uncertainty.
Thursday, 10 July 2025: 11:00
Location: SJES002 (Faculty of Legal, Economic, and Social Sciences (JES))
Oral Presentation
"Healthcare infrastructures" evoke the result of efforts by healthcare organizations and institutions to support the many facets of clinical and administrative work. Such infrastructures are often designed largely without involving healthcare professionals in the process.
We introduce here the concept of ‘grassroots infrastructures’ to refer to socio-technical systems, invisible to formal procedures and rationalized representations of work, created through the artful tinkering with available resources. The widespread diffusion of personal communication technologies has enabled healthcare professionals to independently create services that would have once required significant institutional efforts. Instant messaging platforms offer an excellent
opportunity to observe how healthcare professionals are capable of creating new configurations of relationships with patients or among themselves to overcome the limitations embedded in the tools provided by organizational technologies.
We argue that acting as grassroots infrastructure builders represents a form of a different professionalism, and that analyzing the processes of creating and using such infrastructures is a promising gateway to understanding the evolution of professionalism in healthcare.
This presentation aims to demonstrate how this analytical lens can be fruitful by examining the relationship between the creation of grassroots infrastructures and knowledge production. In this work, we refer to two different contexts characterized by epistemic uncertainty: the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic and the limitations of guidelines in the field of breast cancer. The study will analyze how these different communities used an instant messaging platform to discuss therapeutic alternatives, share clinical experiences, and act as epistemic communities to gain recognition from
the scientific community for the knowledge produced.
We intend to show that making and using grassroots infrastructures can be considered a trait of new organizing professionalism (Noordegraaf 2015) and a strategy to address the crisis of expertise(Eyal 2018) in the medical field.
We introduce here the concept of ‘grassroots infrastructures’ to refer to socio-technical systems, invisible to formal procedures and rationalized representations of work, created through the artful tinkering with available resources. The widespread diffusion of personal communication technologies has enabled healthcare professionals to independently create services that would have once required significant institutional efforts. Instant messaging platforms offer an excellent
opportunity to observe how healthcare professionals are capable of creating new configurations of relationships with patients or among themselves to overcome the limitations embedded in the tools provided by organizational technologies.
We argue that acting as grassroots infrastructure builders represents a form of a different professionalism, and that analyzing the processes of creating and using such infrastructures is a promising gateway to understanding the evolution of professionalism in healthcare.
This presentation aims to demonstrate how this analytical lens can be fruitful by examining the relationship between the creation of grassroots infrastructures and knowledge production. In this work, we refer to two different contexts characterized by epistemic uncertainty: the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic and the limitations of guidelines in the field of breast cancer. The study will analyze how these different communities used an instant messaging platform to discuss therapeutic alternatives, share clinical experiences, and act as epistemic communities to gain recognition from
the scientific community for the knowledge produced.
We intend to show that making and using grassroots infrastructures can be considered a trait of new organizing professionalism (Noordegraaf 2015) and a strategy to address the crisis of expertise(Eyal 2018) in the medical field.