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https://docs.google.com/document/d/1WJ5o7a1I7rL8YagcYNQghEhT1Y3Xq6Ll_fukKtk5F5M/edit?usp=sharing

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Vital circulations as a conceptual framework

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Vital circulations as a conceptual framework

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How does it differ from: infrastructures, platforms, assemblages?
Focus on movements/circulations & what are the blockages and breaks
The messiness of life, contingency, flows vs. closed circuits, fixed, reproduced, security
What about vitality?
Does it work as a concept at all?

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From Jessie's work, multiple circuits, pathways and channels  (kinship, race, care in clinical space, viral pathways)
Time and temporality
Bringing embryos into life as circuits (Risa), also salvaging the future of white supremacy (white saviour) while reproducing colonial racial relations
at once electronic (electrons around a circuit) and embodied (blood circulation)

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1) Consent and donation involving alienation & separation of tissues (classic anthro work on rites of passage, movement, transition, harvesting, reintegration, Carsten's work on relationality)
2) Deaths and regeneration of cells, tissues, persons (anthro work on good death, etc.)
3) Aesthetics and visibility of scars of transplant/transfusion and the question of "matching" (not just immunocompatibility, but also the apparence of looking right, cf. racialised matching or marketing, aesthetics to whom? whose vision/sight is privileged)

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The Sociological Review monograph?
BioSocieties
Medical Anthropology
New Genetics & Society

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early June: CfP with deadline of early September,

mid September-November: decision and organising the symposium

November 2022- : Symposium & post-symposium writing up of a proposal+abstracts, submission to a journal

Summer 2023: draft of papers due, internal review (round 1 & 2?)

Early 2024: submission of the issue papers??

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Conceptual introduction on vital circulations
Empirical papers (who'd like to contribute?
Discussion (who can we invite?)

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How are inequities built into the circulations and become reproduced

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https://padlet.com/JiniKim/15uvmdzdykrij89o

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https://vitalcirculations.org/events/4/

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About this event
Vital Circulations // Vital Data
White Rose Vital Circulations Network Symposium 3

Universities of Leeds, York and Sheffield

Friday July 22nd 2022, 12:30 - 16:45 BST (Zoom)

Register from this link: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/vital-circulations-vital-data-symposium-tickets-365908681717

This one-day online symposium considers the theme of data circulations in the broad context of the 'vital' - bodies, life and death - and its various circulations - the biotic or pathogenic, the infrastructural, the digital, the transplantable and the heritable. Too much of a focus on matter in these contexts might elide the role that vital data play in these flows; as a virus and its mutations move around the world, calls come for data to be shared openly between nations. Before human tissue is shipped internationally for clinical transplant, donor and patient data must be checked for compatibility. Data and matter become entangled in vital circulations. As such, with this third of the Vital Circulations symposia, we explore how data - and the values and practices surrounding them - constitute an important current in these contemporary 'vital circulations'. We do this through bringing into conversation a cross-disciplinary range of provocations from the arts and humanities, critical data studies, and the social sciences.

Confirmed speakers include:

* Itzelle Medina-Perea, The University of Sheffield

* Ilaria Galasso, University College Dublin

* Ernesto Schwartz-Marín, University of Exeter

* Eva Hilberg, The University of Sheffield

Presentations will include discussions of citizen-led forensics, the use of data mining for drug discovery, notions of 'real world evidence' and ideas of collective good in the context of genetic research.

Schedule:

12:30-12.45 Opening: 'Vital Circulations' | Jieun Kim

12:45-13:00 Vital Circulations // Vital Data | Ros Williams

Session 1 (Chair: Lijiaozi Cheng)

13:00-13:30 The next data revolution? - The promises of Real World Evidence | Eva Hilberg

13:30-14:00 Patterns in Practice - beliefs, values and feelings in practitioners' engagements with data mining for drug discovery | Itzelle Medina Perea

14.00-14.30 Discussion, with intervention from discussant Paul Martin
Refreshment break (30 mins)
Session 2 (Chair: Ros Williams)

15:00-15:30 Genetic data and the collective good: participants as leaders to reconcile individual and public interest | Ilaria Galasso

15:30-16:00 Citizen-Led Forensics: Participatory challenges to the politics of vitality in the search for the disappeared in Mexico | Ernesto Schwartz-Marín

16:00-16:30 Discussion, with intervention from discussant Marie-Andrée Jacob

16:30-16:45 Concluding remarks to close (Ros Williams and Paul Martin)

Background:

Over the last two years, we've been exposed to daily-updated data dashboards - figures of infection, hospitalisation, mortality, vaccine uptake. These digits might be understood as numeric representations of bodily states - disease, illness, death. They might be what most of us think of at the moment when we're invited to consider how 'vital' data circulate. Yet they are part of a global mosaic of such data that do (and sometimes do not) flow; from the promises of expansive health data platforms and machine learning, the possibilities of citizen-led attempts to collate and manage health data, to the material complexities of infrastructural interoperability, and professional and public reticence about data giving, sharing and use.

Some of these vital data are heavily commercialised, their production encouraged by massive corporations who've increasingly sought to monetise well-established practices of tracking ourselves (Sharon 2018; Williams et al. 2020). These might be understood as another asset in the bow of what increasingly is referred to as platform capitalism (Snricek 2016). Other vital data have very different biographies. For example, plans to create links between the UK's National Health Service (NHS) patient data and commercial and academic researchers have stalled multiple times; still other NHS data still managed to find their way into the Government's Home Office, being used in live immigration cases (Medina Perea et al. 2020; Fitzgerald et al. 2020). Then there is the increasingly data-driven world of biomedicine. Genomics, regenerative and personalised medicine, pharmaceutical development - these fields (or at least our imaginaries of them) all rely on the fast, high yield of vital data to generate treatments and, perhaps, profit. What are the contours of these circulations, what constitute these data, and what values and practices delimit their circulation and use? Simultaneously, these data might also delineate difference: ethnic- or gender-specific drug outcomes might reify differences in unexpected ways, as data potentially participate in 'othering' us (Pollock 2012)

Through the symposium, we seek to ask:

* In what ways do vital data circulate, or fail to flow, in the broader context of vital circulations?

* In what different contexts do these vital data flows (and stoppages) take place? What values are entangled in these contexts? On what practices do they rely?

* How might vital data play a role in (re)producing difference, or othering certain individuals or groups?

* In what different contexts - the commercial, the commons - might vital data flow, and with what consequence?

The symposium is part of the wider Vital Circulations network, a ESRC White Rose University Consortium-funded collaborative network. It is the third in a series of symposia, including Biomes, Bodies and Buildings and Tissue Donations Beyond the Gift of Life. Discussions from these symposia will be drawn into a final network symposium in Autumn 2022, and contributors will be invited to participate in a network-wide special issue.

Abstracts and speaker bios
The next data revolution? - The promises of Real World Evidence | Eva Hilberg, University of Sheffield
A quiet epistemic revolution is underway in the field of pharmaceutical regulation - purportedly opening medicine's highly specialised decision-making processes towards influence from the 'real world'. Real World Evidence (RWE) is the emerging paradigm promising to transform the field of pharmaceutical regulation to include evidence derived from Real World Data (RWD), that is, data generated in non-randomised controlled (RCT) study designs in a potentially radical turn away from the erstwhile 'gold standard' of medical research. There is considerable emphasis on the experience of patients within this concept of the 'real world', giving rise to new hopes about inclusion and representation of both experience and outcomes. This hype around RWE is not accidental, but actively promoted by central institutions such as for instance the FDA and the US' 21st Century Cures Act (2016). However, nothing about this 'real world' is clear-cut, as other post-approval gatekeepers are conducting their own assessments of RWE's promise, leading to fundamental regional disconnects especially where it comes to evaluating the actual quality of the data being generated in different 'real world' modalities such as registries, insurance data collections, and more individualised digital health applications. This paper argues that the resulting tensions are effects of an instance of promissory regulation (Hogarth & Martin 2021), which can lead to a further real-term fragmentation of access to treatments and may fail to deliver on the hopes of already underserved patient communities such as those with rare disease.
Eva Hilberg Patterns in Practice - beliefs, values and feelings in practitioners' engagements with data mining for drug discovery | Itzelle Medina Perea, University of Sheffield is a Post-doctoral Research Associate at the iHuman Institute (Sociological Studies), University of Sheffield, where she works on a Wellcome Trust-funded project on 'Orphan Drugs: high prices, access to medicines and the transformation of biopharmaceutical innovation' (PI: Prof. Paul Martin). Her previous work analysed the use of new technologies and intellectual property rights in the definition of global health priorities, and has been published in 'BioSocieties', 'Third World Quarterly', 'Critical Public Health', 'Social Science and Medicine', and 'Sociology of Health and Illness'. Itzelle Medina Perea Genetic data and the collective good: participants as leaders to reconcile individual and public interest | Ilaria Galasso, University College Dublin is a postdoctoral researcher at the Information School, University of Sheffield, where she also completed her PhD in 2021. She's working on Patterns in Practice (PIP), an AHRC-funded project that is exploring how practitioners' beliefs, values and feelings interact to shape how they engage with and in data mining and machine learning- forms of 'narrow AI'. PIP investigates three different - and contrasting - contexts: pharmaceutical drug discovery, higher education learning analytics and arts practice. The project runs from August 2021 to February 2024. She is also part of Living With Data, a research project that aims to understand people's knowledge and perceptions of data practices, and what they think constitute 'fair' data practices. As part of her PhD research, Itzelle explored how sociocultural values interact with material conditions to shape "data journeys" in the UK health sector, focusing on the reuse of patient data for research. Ilaria Galasso Citizen-Led Forensics: Participatory challenges to the politics of vitality in the search for the disappeared in Mexico | Ernesto Schwartz-Marín, University of Exeter is a postdoctoral researcher in the MISFIRES ERC project on collaborative innovation in healthcare for the collective good, at University College Dublin. She has a background in ethical and political philosophy and philosophy of science, she did her PhD in Science and Technology Studies at the European School of Molecular Medicine based in Milan. Ilaria works in the area of political philosophy of biomedicine, with a primary interest in social equity, health equity, and the connections between the two: her research analyzes medical innovation from an ethical and political perspective, by considering the possibly deriving benefits and their distributions and accessibility, in relation to justice, social inequalities and the social determinants of health. Since April 2020 she also collaborates with the multinational social science consortium "Solidarity in Times of a Pandemic", examining how people responded to the COVID-19 pandemic and the ensuing policy measures, and why, by listening directly to them. Ernesto Schwartz-Marín is a Science and Technology Studies scholar working in the fields of biomedicine, forensics, and citizen science at Exeter University. Ernesto's works explores the development of participatory models to intervene in humanitarian crises via grass-roots databases, and citizen-led science, he has been Principal Investigator in two ESRC Transformative research projects: Citizen-Led Forensics and Data Justice Project, (2018-21), and Co-PI of large Newton Fund grant that sought to understand and tackle kidnapping in Mexico, Colombia and the US border. His research on genomics, forensics and coloniality has been published in Social Studies of Science, Sociology and Social Research.
The use of AI techniques in drug discovery has a long history with waves of interest dating back to the 1960s. However, similar to other domains, the last couple of decades has seen renewed interest fuelled by the rapid growth of available data, the increase in computing power, the development of new methods for processing data, and the optimisation of machine learning algorithms. These developments have provoked mixed reactions within the drug discovery community. They have brought excitement and enthusiasm, but also fear, anxiety and scepticism. Many have argued that the current AI hype overlooks many limitations of these techniques and raise concerns about their black-boxed nature. Such beliefs, values and feelings play out as complex power dynamics among practitioners across the drug discovery pipeline. I will present our early analysis of a series of interviews, focus groups, diaries and observations with a team working on a drug discovery project at a major UK pharmaceutical company, reflecting on how our participants' beliefs, values and feelings about machine learning techniques and practices in this context are shaping their culture of practice and how they relate to one another and the people impacted by their work

This paper problematizes the notion of collective good in the context of genetic research and juxtaposes consequentialist and deontological ethics around appropriating and using genetic data. It scrutinizes the frictions between public and individual interests, and between the duty to share (in the name of the "public good", Harris 2005, Schaefer et al. 2009, Rhodes 2017) and the right not to share (in the name of individual sovereignty, Archard 2008, Beauchamp 2010) genetic data. This paper is grounded on documentary analysis and fieldwork interviews with participant representatives or research leaders concerned with participant protection and involvement in leading genetic research projects (All of Us in the US and Genomics England in the UK) or around genetic data controversies. It focuses particularly on two recent controversies: the case of the UK institute Wellcome Sanger accused of planning unauthorized commercialization of African DNA samples (Stokstad 2019), and the case of the company Genuity Science planning genetic research on brain tumor samples in Ireland with no explicit patient consent (Noteworthy 2020), and then transferring Irish genetic data to a US-based company (Noteworthy 2021). It questions the link between genetic data use and the collective good and concludes by advocating for participant co-governance and co-leadership in genetic research, especially when minorities or vulnerable communities are involved. Moving beyond informed consent and participant/public consultation and engagement, we argue that if genetic research is led or co-led by community representatives, such patient governance can prevent exploitation and promote transparency and trust, fostering the equitable pursuit of the collective good while protecting participant sovereignty. The paper concludes by opening up this argument to the concept of global good and the concerns around the involvement of low-income countries in genetic research: it advocates for investments on research conducted BY them rather than ON them to overcome the risk of exploitation due to power imbalance (Skloot 2010, Stokstad 2019), and the potential "distraction" from the most urgent global health needs (Bayer and Galea 2015, Rao 2016, Wonkam 2021).

My work explores the intersections between (in)justice and science in Latin America. I am convinced that ethnographic explorations of how science as practice- and regulatory ideal- shapes our political imaginations provide powerful vantage points for academic critique, but also for social action and interventions. Therefore, I combine participant observation with participatory action research to create citizen-led interventions to gather DNA to search for the disappeared, learn about grass-root intelligence units to tackle kidnapping in Mexico, or think how cultural and digital product such as videogames or soap operas can catalyse meaningful social change oriented towards justice. In this talk I will explore the challenges of mobilising vital components of our bodies such as DNA to create bridges between those absent, or those buried in clandestine mass graves across Mexico. My aim is to elaborate and explore the ways in which my own work creating alternative forms of DNA biobanking with relatives of the disappeared seek to push certain socio-technical boundaries, while at the same time reinforcing the very practices it hoped to challenge. I will explore the manifold ways in which participatory challenges to state centred practices that seek to monopolise, steer, and own vitality have changed me as a researcher, but also the wider discourse on political participation and forensic evidence in Mexico and Latin America. My talk will seek to uncover the thorny and intimate work of caring for vital data in the search for the disappeared in Mexico, while providing a candid view of the dynamics and power plays that have shaped our own participatory experiments. In terms of theory, I will expand and enrich notions of vulnerability, data justice and feminist Science and Technology Studies in context of wide social injustice, conflict and violence such as the current 'War on Drugs in Mexico', that according to the Mexican government has produced ~350,000 violent executions and over 100,000 disappeared persons in the last 15 years.

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Please find here information for our latest event: About this event Vital Circulations // Vital Data White Rose Vital Circulations Network Symposium 3 Universities of Leeds, York and Sheffield Friday July 22nd 2022, 12:30 - 16:45 BST (Zoom) Register from this link: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/vital-circulations-vital-data-symposium-tickets-365908681717 This one-day online symposium considers the theme of data circulations in the broad...

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Link to symposium's programme and abstracts

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Link to symposium's programme and abstracts

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https://vitalcirculations.org/events

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An online Symposium

6th January 202 2
A White Rose Vital Circulations Network Symposium
Universities of Leeds, York and Sheffield

This one-day symposium explores fresh perspectives on the biotic life of buildings. It will hear contributions about the changing way the built environment has been shaped by differing and competing architectural priorities and infectious disease events/discourses.

The symposium will bring together contributions from the sociology of health and medicine, medical humanities, engineering, design, architecture and microbiology.
This symposium asks:
What will it mean to rethink architectural spaces as multispecies environments, in a way that takes more account of the microbiological?

How has the built environment evolved in tandem with the evolution of pathogens?

How is it that different disciplines and stakeholders align or not around biotic priorities?

How might we rethink the significance of air, atmosphere, surfaces, materials and layouts to mutually accommodate the microbial and the human?

How might we envisage a future research agenda that learns from the present and the past to rethink the future of building design?
Background:
Architecture has been lastingly configured microbially. Modernist influences have been understood to be steeped in late C19th pre-germ theory miasmic theories of disease. Progressive building design sought to banish torpid airs, stagnant dark corners, elevating buildings away from damp ground.

The resulting emphasis on larger volume, open designs placed a premium on the free movement of sunlight and fresh air. The use of terraces, glazing, ventilation and other features had intentionally transformed healthcare buildings into therapeutic medical instruments.

The advent of antibiotics and vaccination arguably diminished the importance of building design to control infectious disease. Covid-19 (and antimicrobial resistance) however has radically reinvigorated the place of spatial design and the built environment in creating safer and liveable biotic environments.
Format:
The symposium will be organised around short contributions from a wide range of disciplines with lots of opportunity for discussion and debate. The event will take place on Zoom. After you register for the event, you will receive the zoom link before the event.
Schedule:
10.00 Jieun Kim (University of Leeds) 'Vital Circulations'

10.10 Nik Brown (University of York) 'Bodies, Biomes and Buildings'

10.30 Richard Beckett (University College London) 'Probioticities'

11.00 Hayley MacGregor (Institute of Development Studies) 'Clinic design, patient flow and the organisation of care: responding to Tuberculosis transmission in primary care facilities in South Africa'

11.30 Discussion & Questions

12.00 Lunch break

12.45 Nick Fox (University of Sheffield) 'Coronavirus, capitalism and the built environment: a more-than-human analysis'

13.15 Robert Walker and Craig Fenton (DataInnovationAI) 'Modelling biorisk in the built environment'

13.45 Daryl Martin (University of York) 'The architecture of risk: the design of clinical space in a post-antibiotic age'

14.15 Break

14.30 Discussants and open discussion: Ros Williams (University of Sheffield) and Sangeeta Chattoo (University of York)

15.00 Ros Williams (close and final wrap up)

Abstracts:
'Probioticities'
Richard Beckett (University College London)

The talk will outline a body of research developed over the last 4 years towards developing a 'probiotic' approach to the design of buildings and urban environments. The work rejects the modernist notion that healthy environments should be defined by the absence of microbes. Instead, new ways for designing buildings are developed through the contemporary understanding of disease and the human microbiome that recognise the essential role that microbes play to healthy bodies and environments. The work develops living materials containing beneficial bacteria that can limit exposure to pathogens but also restore environmental microbes missing from buildings and cities.
Biographical note:
Richard Beckett is an Architect and Associate Professor of Bioaugmented Design at the Bartlett, UCL. He is Director of RC7 on the BPro Architectural Design master's programme and leads Studio 3 on the Landscape Architecture course. His research is focused on design operating at the intersection of computation, biofabrication, and microbial ecologies in buildings and cities. His research on Probiotic Design won the RIBA Presidents Medal for Research in 2020. He has built numerous projects and has been exhibited internationally including Archilab - Naturalising Architecture, The Pompidou Centre and Nature - Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum.
Clinic design, patient flow and the organisation of care: responding to Tuberculosis transmission in primary care facilities in South Africa.
Hayley MacGregor, Karina Kielmann and Sanj Karat

In contexts with an ongoing high burden of Tuberculosis (TB), a concern with reducing airborne transmission of microbes in health facilities long predates the COVID-19 pandemic. In South Africa, infection prevention and control (IPC) as a key consideration for the design of primary care facilities gained added impetus due to shifts away from specialist inpatient units for TB, to decentralised care. Nosocomial transmission of TB is not only an occupational risk for health care workers; it is also of particular concern for those who are HIV positive, who are at risk of co-infection and have come to constitute a significant proportion of people attending regular outpatient visits. Dominant discourse as to why TB IPC is poorly implemented in health facilities has tended to blame healthcare workers for poor compliance with mask wearing or the opening of windows. Standard interventions have proposed technical changes to material infrastructures, such as extractor fans, windows and outdoor waiting areas. We discuss findings from Umoya Omuhle or 'fresh air', an interdisciplinary project that approached the reduction of TB transmission in primary care clinics in South Africa from a 'whole systems' perspective. Ventilation measurements, assessments of patient 'flow', a prevalence survey and infection transmission modelling were combined with interviews, clinic ethnography and systems dynamic modelling methods to identify a suite of cost-effective interventions that could provide fresh insights into addressing a seemingly intractable problem.

In this presentation we unpack the concept of 'flow', a composite of space, time, and the numbers and movement of people in relation to each other. These elements are influenced not only by the design of buildings, but also by social, managerial and care infrastructures as they manifest within clinics. Interviews with government architects and engineers revealed that they must balance multiple and at times competing priorities in building design. Moreover, shifts in clinic populations and in policy - such as the 'ideal clinic' initiative - rapidly change 'patient pathways' on the ground and create new bottlenecks for 'congregation' and transmission. Yet policy shifts can also open opportunities for synergistic action to improve IPC, such as through appointment systems instituted in response to concerns about long waiting times. We examine the opportunities and challenges posed by the intersection of microbial, infrastructural and policy dynamics and consider the implications of this learning for South African clinics in the COVID era.
Biographical note:
Hayley MacGregor trained clinically in South Africa and is a medical anthropologist at the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex.

Karina Kielmann is co-principal investigator of the Umoya Omuhle project and a medical anthropologist with training also in public health and expertise in strengthening health systems for TB and HIV care. She is a professor of health systems and policy research at the Institute of Tropical Medicine in Antwerp.

Sanj Karat is a TB epidemiologist based at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. His research includes clinical and health systems interventions to reduce morbidity and mortality in people with HIV and/or TB and methods used to estimate mortality in resource-limited settings.
Coronavirus, capitalism and the built environment: a more-than-human analysis.
Nick J Fox, University of Huddersfield, UK

The coronavirus pandemic has highlighted how the spaces that humans inhabit have contributed to social class, ethnic and gendered inequalities in Covid prevalence. For instance, meat processing plants in Australia, UK, US and elsewhere have been sources of localised community outbreaks of Covid-19. Other risky working environments such as food packaging and 'sweat-shop' garment manufacturers have also been implicated as Covid hot-spots.

I shall argue that these associations between workplace built environments and social inequalities may be understood via a more-than-human analysis of the 'pandemic assemblage'. This reveals that when coronavirus gained the capacity to infect human cells, it also gained the ability to piggy-back on the social relations of capitalism. This assessment explains both Covid's rapid global spread *and* the class, ethnic and gendered inequalities in prevalence and death rates. For instance, a demand for cheap food and an international trade has driven down margins in meat processing, so that manufacturers depend upon low paid and precarious labour (often drawn disproportionately from BAME groups). Hygiene facilities in factories may be poor; while workers in some plants are housed in crowded and poor quality accommodation. All these 'tiny disadvantages' increase the chances of Covid-19 incidence and hence prevalence within such environments. By contrast, many workers in non-manual and professional jobs have safer work built environments, or have been able to avoid workplaces altogether by working from home during coronavirus restrictions.

This more-than-human approach supplies an alternative to the mainstream public health and scientific perspectives on the pandemic, with important implications for current and future policy on the built environment and microbiology.

Biographical note:

Nick J. Fox is professor of sociology at the Universities of Huddersfield (part-time) and Sheffield (honorary), and has used new materialist and posthuman approaches to study sustainable development, climate change policy, social disadvantage and health, and materialist research methodology. He is the author (with Pam Alldred) of *Sociology and the New Materialism* (Sage, 2017).
'Modelling biorisk in the built environment'
Robert Walker and Craig Fenton (DataInnovationAI)

The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed a class of risk that, while continuously present, has been overlooked until now. Just as structures where many people congregate potentially expose their occupants to fire risk, air quality risk, water safety risk, etc., it is now clear that any large, enclosed structure may pose a bio-safety risk to its occupants. There is currently no solution to assessing these risks, in fact we have lived with this for many years with flu alone contributing to more than 150 million lost productivity days in the over 50's.

£130bn of commercial construction is commissioned in the UK each year and air flow in these buildings primarily focuses on the comfort of occupants, using people density as a direct measure of success. The complex interaction of pathogen modelling, facility engineering and human movement - and lack of regulation - has prohibited the development of standards. However, data driven techniques and high capacity computing are becoming commercially viable, creating opportunities for bio-safety assessment and mitigation.

Data Innovation.AI has developed a prototype, AI-driven solution to bio-safety assessment in the built environment. While we will have to live with COVID and other workplace transmissible infections buildings can now be designed to reduce the opportunities for infection to spread across its occupants.
Data Innovation.AI Ltd Bios:
Craig Fenton, Chief Operating Officer, With over 30 years of experience in the IT sector, Craig's exceptional range of skills and experience includes software development, Telecommunications, Data Networks, infrastructure convergence, Data Centres and smart buildings.

Robert Walker, Chief Advocacy Officer, over 30 years technology and commercial experience gained in both start-up and large corporate environments. Robert has delivered leading edge technologies in Japan, the US and across mainland Europe.
The architecture of risk: the design of clinical space in a post-antibiotic age
Daryl Martin, University of York, UK

This paper opens up questions of infection control, architectural atmospherics, embodied practices and their intersections, in the contemporary accomplishment of clinical space. Specifically, we focus on the example of the recently opened Skane University Hospital Infectious Disease Center, located in Malmö and designed by CF Moller + Link Arkitektur. We do so in order to illustrate how recent strains of infectious disease are reflected in its architectural design, which uses open-air decking to enclose a central drum of patient space and an internal administrative core. We also explore how this design, in turn, shapes new experiences of illness, risk and care. This is a building in which design becomes an articulation of infection control, its architects responding to shifting understandings of what clinical space might look like when our antibiotics fail. Locating this building within a wider history of hospital architecture, we use documentary sources to trace the changing arrangements, organisational imperatives and affective atmospheres of ward design. Doing so allows us to explore how such mutable spatial organizations enacted changing ideas of disease management - from the control of space to the control of contact between people through space. Locating our contemporary case study alongside historical examples, and within geographical writings on architecture, and its affective atmospheres, allows us to develop a greater understanding of the role of materialities, mobilities and design in the social construction of risk in a post-antibiotic age.

Biographical note:

Daryl Martin is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of York, where he is also the Deputy Director of the Research Centre for the Social Sciences (ReCSS) and he co-directs the Centre for Urban Research (CURB). Daryl's research interests are focused on the intersection of architecture, embodiment and health, and he has been working on a number of recent research projects in this area funded by a range of UK research councils.
Register for this upcoming event here:

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Please find here information for our latest event: About this event Vital Circulations // Vital Data White Rose Vital Circulations Network Symposium 3 Universities of Leeds, York and Sheffield Friday July 22nd 2022, 12:30 - 16:45 BST (Zoom) Register from this link: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/vital-circulations-vital-data-symposium-tickets-365908681717 This one-day online symposium considers the theme of data circulations in the broad...

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Link to symposium's programme and abstracts

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Link to symposium's programme and abstracts

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https://vitalcirculations.org/events/3/

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
An online Symposium

6th January 202 2
A White Rose Vital Circulations Network Symposium
Universities of Leeds, York and Sheffield

This one-day symposium explores fresh perspectives on the biotic life of buildings. It will hear contributions about the changing way the built environment has been shaped by differing and competing architectural priorities and infectious disease events/discourses.

The symposium will bring together contributions from the sociology of health and medicine, medical humanities, engineering, design, architecture and microbiology.
This symposium asks:
What will it mean to rethink architectural spaces as multispecies environments, in a way that takes more account of the microbiological?

How has the built environment evolved in tandem with the evolution of pathogens?

How is it that different disciplines and stakeholders align or not around biotic priorities?

How might we rethink the significance of air, atmosphere, surfaces, materials and layouts to mutually accommodate the microbial and the human?

How might we envisage a future research agenda that learns from the present and the past to rethink the future of building design?
Background:
Architecture has been lastingly configured microbially. Modernist influences have been understood to be steeped in late C19th pre-germ theory miasmic theories of disease. Progressive building design sought to banish torpid airs, stagnant dark corners, elevating buildings away from damp ground.

The resulting emphasis on larger volume, open designs placed a premium on the free movement of sunlight and fresh air. The use of terraces, glazing, ventilation and other features had intentionally transformed healthcare buildings into therapeutic medical instruments.

The advent of antibiotics and vaccination arguably diminished the importance of building design to control infectious disease. Covid-19 (and antimicrobial resistance) however has radically reinvigorated the place of spatial design and the built environment in creating safer and liveable biotic environments.
Format:
The symposium will be organised around short contributions from a wide range of disciplines with lots of opportunity for discussion and debate. The event will take place on Zoom. After you register for the event, you will receive the zoom link before the event.
Schedule:
10.00 Jieun Kim (University of Leeds) 'Vital Circulations'

10.10 Nik Brown (University of York) 'Bodies, Biomes and Buildings'

10.30 Richard Beckett (University College London) 'Probioticities'

11.00 Hayley MacGregor (Institute of Development Studies) 'Clinic design, patient flow and the organisation of care: responding to Tuberculosis transmission in primary care facilities in South Africa'

11.30 Discussion & Questions

12.00 Lunch break

12.45 Nick Fox (University of Sheffield) 'Coronavirus, capitalism and the built environment: a more-than-human analysis'

13.15 Robert Walker and Craig Fenton (DataInnovationAI) 'Modelling biorisk in the built environment'

13.45 Daryl Martin (University of York) 'The architecture of risk: the design of clinical space in a post-antibiotic age'

14.15 Break

14.30 Discussants and open discussion: Ros Williams (University of Sheffield) and Sangeeta Chattoo (University of York)

15.00 Ros Williams (close and final wrap up)

Abstracts:
'Probioticities'
Richard Beckett (University College London)

The talk will outline a body of research developed over the last 4 years towards developing a 'probiotic' approach to the design of buildings and urban environments. The work rejects the modernist notion that healthy environments should be defined by the absence of microbes. Instead, new ways for designing buildings are developed through the contemporary understanding of disease and the human microbiome that recognise the essential role that microbes play to healthy bodies and environments. The work develops living materials containing beneficial bacteria that can limit exposure to pathogens but also restore environmental microbes missing from buildings and cities.
Biographical note:
Richard Beckett is an Architect and Associate Professor of Bioaugmented Design at the Bartlett, UCL. He is Director of RC7 on the BPro Architectural Design master's programme and leads Studio 3 on the Landscape Architecture course. His research is focused on design operating at the intersection of computation, biofabrication, and microbial ecologies in buildings and cities. His research on Probiotic Design won the RIBA Presidents Medal for Research in 2020. He has built numerous projects and has been exhibited internationally including Archilab - Naturalising Architecture, The Pompidou Centre and Nature - Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum.
Clinic design, patient flow and the organisation of care: responding to Tuberculosis transmission in primary care facilities in South Africa.
Hayley MacGregor, Karina Kielmann and Sanj Karat

In contexts with an ongoing high burden of Tuberculosis (TB), a concern with reducing airborne transmission of microbes in health facilities long predates the COVID-19 pandemic. In South Africa, infection prevention and control (IPC) as a key consideration for the design of primary care facilities gained added impetus due to shifts away from specialist inpatient units for TB, to decentralised care. Nosocomial transmission of TB is not only an occupational risk for health care workers; it is also of particular concern for those who are HIV positive, who are at risk of co-infection and have come to constitute a significant proportion of people attending regular outpatient visits. Dominant discourse as to why TB IPC is poorly implemented in health facilities has tended to blame healthcare workers for poor compliance with mask wearing or the opening of windows. Standard interventions have proposed technical changes to material infrastructures, such as extractor fans, windows and outdoor waiting areas. We discuss findings from Umoya Omuhle or 'fresh air', an interdisciplinary project that approached the reduction of TB transmission in primary care clinics in South Africa from a 'whole systems' perspective. Ventilation measurements, assessments of patient 'flow', a prevalence survey and infection transmission modelling were combined with interviews, clinic ethnography and systems dynamic modelling methods to identify a suite of cost-effective interventions that could provide fresh insights into addressing a seemingly intractable problem.

In this presentation we unpack the concept of 'flow', a composite of space, time, and the numbers and movement of people in relation to each other. These elements are influenced not only by the design of buildings, but also by social, managerial and care infrastructures as they manifest within clinics. Interviews with government architects and engineers revealed that they must balance multiple and at times competing priorities in building design. Moreover, shifts in clinic populations and in policy - such as the 'ideal clinic' initiative - rapidly change 'patient pathways' on the ground and create new bottlenecks for 'congregation' and transmission. Yet policy shifts can also open opportunities for synergistic action to improve IPC, such as through appointment systems instituted in response to concerns about long waiting times. We examine the opportunities and challenges posed by the intersection of microbial, infrastructural and policy dynamics and consider the implications of this learning for South African clinics in the COVID era.
Biographical note:
Hayley MacGregor trained clinically in South Africa and is a medical anthropologist at the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex.

Karina Kielmann is co-principal investigator of the Umoya Omuhle project and a medical anthropologist with training also in public health and expertise in strengthening health systems for TB and HIV care. She is a professor of health systems and policy research at the Institute of Tropical Medicine in Antwerp.

Sanj Karat is a TB epidemiologist based at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. His research includes clinical and health systems interventions to reduce morbidity and mortality in people with HIV and/or TB and methods used to estimate mortality in resource-limited settings.
Coronavirus, capitalism and the built environment: a more-than-human analysis.
Nick J Fox, University of Huddersfield, UK

The coronavirus pandemic has highlighted how the spaces that humans inhabit have contributed to social class, ethnic and gendered inequalities in Covid prevalence. For instance, meat processing plants in Australia, UK, US and elsewhere have been sources of localised community outbreaks of Covid-19. Other risky working environments such as food packaging and 'sweat-shop' garment manufacturers have also been implicated as Covid hot-spots.

I shall argue that these associations between workplace built environments and social inequalities may be understood via a more-than-human analysis of the 'pandemic assemblage'. This reveals that when coronavirus gained the capacity to infect human cells, it also gained the ability to piggy-back on the social relations of capitalism. This assessment explains both Covid's rapid global spread *and* the class, ethnic and gendered inequalities in prevalence and death rates. For instance, a demand for cheap food and an international trade has driven down margins in meat processing, so that manufacturers depend upon low paid and precarious labour (often drawn disproportionately from BAME groups). Hygiene facilities in factories may be poor; while workers in some plants are housed in crowded and poor quality accommodation. All these 'tiny disadvantages' increase the chances of Covid-19 incidence and hence prevalence within such environments. By contrast, many workers in non-manual and professional jobs have safer work built environments, or have been able to avoid workplaces altogether by working from home during coronavirus restrictions.

This more-than-human approach supplies an alternative to the mainstream public health and scientific perspectives on the pandemic, with important implications for current and future policy on the built environment and microbiology.

Biographical note:

Nick J. Fox is professor of sociology at the Universities of Huddersfield (part-time) and Sheffield (honorary), and has used new materialist and posthuman approaches to study sustainable development, climate change policy, social disadvantage and health, and materialist research methodology. He is the author (with Pam Alldred) of *Sociology and the New Materialism* (Sage, 2017).
'Modelling biorisk in the built environment'
Robert Walker and Craig Fenton (DataInnovationAI)

The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed a class of risk that, while continuously present, has been overlooked until now. Just as structures where many people congregate potentially expose their occupants to fire risk, air quality risk, water safety risk, etc., it is now clear that any large, enclosed structure may pose a bio-safety risk to its occupants. There is currently no solution to assessing these risks, in fact we have lived with this for many years with flu alone contributing to more than 150 million lost productivity days in the over 50's.

£130bn of commercial construction is commissioned in the UK each year and air flow in these buildings primarily focuses on the comfort of occupants, using people density as a direct measure of success. The complex interaction of pathogen modelling, facility engineering and human movement - and lack of regulation - has prohibited the development of standards. However, data driven techniques and high capacity computing are becoming commercially viable, creating opportunities for bio-safety assessment and mitigation.

Data Innovation.AI has developed a prototype, AI-driven solution to bio-safety assessment in the built environment. While we will have to live with COVID and other workplace transmissible infections buildings can now be designed to reduce the opportunities for infection to spread across its occupants.
Data Innovation.AI Ltd Bios:
Craig Fenton, Chief Operating Officer, With over 30 years of experience in the IT sector, Craig's exceptional range of skills and experience includes software development, Telecommunications, Data Networks, infrastructure convergence, Data Centres and smart buildings.

Robert Walker, Chief Advocacy Officer, over 30 years technology and commercial experience gained in both start-up and large corporate environments. Robert has delivered leading edge technologies in Japan, the US and across mainland Europe.
The architecture of risk: the design of clinical space in a post-antibiotic age
Daryl Martin, University of York, UK

This paper opens up questions of infection control, architectural atmospherics, embodied practices and their intersections, in the contemporary accomplishment of clinical space. Specifically, we focus on the example of the recently opened Skane University Hospital Infectious Disease Center, located in Malmö and designed by CF Moller + Link Arkitektur. We do so in order to illustrate how recent strains of infectious disease are reflected in its architectural design, which uses open-air decking to enclose a central drum of patient space and an internal administrative core. We also explore how this design, in turn, shapes new experiences of illness, risk and care. This is a building in which design becomes an articulation of infection control, its architects responding to shifting understandings of what clinical space might look like when our antibiotics fail. Locating this building within a wider history of hospital architecture, we use documentary sources to trace the changing arrangements, organisational imperatives and affective atmospheres of ward design. Doing so allows us to explore how such mutable spatial organizations enacted changing ideas of disease management - from the control of space to the control of contact between people through space. Locating our contemporary case study alongside historical examples, and within geographical writings on architecture, and its affective atmospheres, allows us to develop a greater understanding of the role of materialities, mobilities and design in the social construction of risk in a post-antibiotic age.

Biographical note:

Daryl Martin is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of York, where he is also the Deputy Director of the Research Centre for the Social Sciences (ReCSS) and he co-directs the Centre for Urban Research (CURB). Daryl's research interests are focused on the intersection of architecture, embodiment and health, and he has been working on a number of recent research projects in this area funded by a range of UK research councils.
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Please find here information for our latest event: About this event Vital Circulations // Vital Data White Rose Vital Circulations Network Symposium 3 Universities of Leeds, York and Sheffield Friday July 22nd 2022, 12:30 - 16:45 BST (Zoom) Register from this link: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/vital-circulations-vital-data-symposium-tickets-365908681717 This one-day online symposium considers the theme of data circulations in the broad...