Digitised Swasthya: Technology and Healthcare As Sociotechnical Ensembles in Rajasthan, India

Over the last few years, the phenomenon of digital healthcare has emerged as a key dimension of contemporary healthcare policy and delivery in many countries. However, the rapid changes brought by digital healthcare technologies, particularly the newer technologies associated with Web 2.0 innovations, have only just begun to be documented and analysed in the academic critical social scientific literature. In that effort, most research has been conducted without much acknowledgement to the sociocultural, ethical and political implications of their use. This becomes problematic as no technological experience typically exists independent of human experience. In addition, no human experience operates in vacuum but as mutually constitutive of every person’s intersectional position. That is, experiences are guided by the combined effects of axes of differentiations such as age, gender, ethnicity, migration, socioeconomic status, religion, and education, to name a few. Research on digital healthcare technologies associated with Web 2.0 using the sociocultural, intersectionality lens has remained in the blind spot of scholarship, and hence, unexplored.
This study engages in an in-depth and nuanced qualitative analysis of one such digital healthcare technology, digital reproductive healthcare, in Rajasthan, India. The study introduces a scaled intersectional approach to analyse how digital reproductive healthcare practices operate to construct various forms of subjectivities and embodiments and participate in the configuring and reproduction of intersectional power relations through various usage patterns. In this study, healthcare is dealt with as an arena in which informationalization, or the process through which information generation and transmission become the fundamental resources of productivity and power, is increasingly central to user experience and decision-making. The study is multi-modal (across digital platforms), and multi-scalar (across geographic and social scales), and is designed on the principles of Constructivist Grounded Theory Method.