Markets Coming Closer? Prof. Dr. Peter Lindner

The emergence of the umbrella term “mobile health” indicates a biopolitical shift that reaches far beyond the health-care sector. New micro-sensors measuring movement, heart rate, blood pressure, body temperature, oxygen saturation, sleeping cycles etc. and integrated into watches, wristbands, belts, spectacles, contact lenses or the soles of footwear allow for the individualized and continuous surveillance of biophysical indicators. Thus new forms of self-optimization have become possible which are encouraged by health insurers and private companies offering bonus systems or PAYL (pay-as-you-live) tariffs. Referring to these developments, the project “Markets Coming Closer:  Mobile Health, Wearable Technologies and the Economization of Bodily Behaviour” focuses on two changes: first, the increasing shifting of the responsibility for health to the individual, who is pushed by social pressure and economic incentives towards a new kind of “care of the self” (Foucault) via one’s technically sensor-recorded body. Second, the emergence of a new ‘frontier region of marketization’ (Mitchell) in the health-care sector. In this way a market is taking shape in which everyday bodily behaviour is financially compensated and which is characterized by a very specific entanglement of micro-technologies with ethically-loaded imperatives of behaving well on the one hand, and with the promise to serve the public good on the other.
 
Governing by Nudge: New Rationalities of Public Health Policies and their Not-So Rational Other (PhD project Timm Brückmann M.A.)
In response to the observed crisis in neoclassical thought and the concept of homo oeconomicus, policy circles around the globe are increasingly focusing on new approaches from which address practical problems and administrative challenges. In this context the subdiscipline of behavioural economics has received prominent attention, as it offers insights and methods that promise to prevent subjects from making irrational choices and suggests new modes of socio-political governance. In particular the concept of “nudging” has risen to prominence as a way of optimizing individual decisions – “more efficient”, “healthier”, “more environmentally friendly” etc. – by designing the respective choice architectures. The project problematizes the different ways in which insights from behavioural economics and neoliberal approaches interconnect. Taking epistemic practices in public health policies as an example it analyses exactly how and at what socio-political ‘cost’ behavioural economics’ knowledge is translated into programs and technologies designed to govern human behaviour.
 
Securitizing Global Health: Foreign Policy for the Next Global Health Crisis (Mara Linden M.A.; DFG-proposal under review)
With the recent Ebola, Zika and other health crises it has become critical for governments to care about global health, develop preventive and protective strategies for pandemics, and strengthen international institutions in reaction to health crises. In Germany, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs has established a global health unit to coordinate German global health politics within government agencies and cooperate with international institutions. The placement of this unit as part of Germany’s foreign policy indicates a move from global health as a health-care issue to global health as a question of global governance. Health is increasingly treated as a biopolitical component of security, signifying the relationship between global health strategies and economic and political security. This research project is concerned with how global health is framed in strategies and action plans, and which sociopolitical and sociotechnical decisions influence the increasing elaboration of related technologies and regulations tracing the emergence of new rationalities in global health policies with regard to “preparedness” and security.

Love and Sex on the Edge of Tomorrow: Economization and Subjectivity on Dating Apps (PhD project Tilman Treier M.A.)
Discourses around love and sex are increasingly characterized by an economic vocabulary. Building on psychological reflections on human mating behavior in terms of ‘sexual economics‘, this understanding of intimate interpersonal relationships has spread not only to anti-feminist fringe groups in the so called “manosphere” but also to pop-cultural discourses. At the same time new technologies that mediate in novel ways how we get to know each other, how we date, with whom we have sex, and who and how we love are becoming widely accepted. Unlike their forerunners, location-aware dating apps create a virtual space that is often labelled the “sexual marketplace” of today’s generation. This research project scrutinizes the complex interrelations between these two cultural transformations. Against the assumption that a sexual marketplace exists by itself, the starting point of this investigation is how individuals’ practices mediated by digital technologies such as dating apps are becoming economized/marketized, with particular attention to the ways in which dating apps mediate our relationships with ourselves and others through processes of abstraction, gamification and valuation.