The Encounters of Science and Technology Studies with Algorithms in the Analysis of Healthcare

This chapter introduces the main goal of the book “Reframing Algorithms”, which is to offer a comprehensive exploration of the encounters between Science and Technology Studies (STS) and a less-covered topic in the STS debate: the design and use of algorithmic technologies in healthcare. The debate about algorithmic technologies in healthcare tend to polarised between enthusiastic and critical positions. Although they might differences, these opposed outlooks tend to share as common ground a deterministic perspective on algorithms, conceiving them as invisible and autonomous “entities”. In contrast this edited book, the contributions gathered for this edited book aim to shed light on the social processes through which algorithms are enacted. Different authors, as briefly anticipated in this chapter, provide theoretical and empirically informed about how algorithms are being incorporated into healthcare settings.