Trauma Apps and the Making of the 'Smart' Refugee.

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• Maha Abdelrahman, Professor of Development Studies and Middle East Politics
• Tuesday 23 November 2021, 13:15-14:00
• Darwin College, Richard King Room.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Prof. Nebojša Radić .

A market for mental health apps, designed to help millions of refugees manage symptoms of PTSD and other mental health issues, has proliferated since the outbreak of the so-called refugee crisis in 2015. These bite-size, on-the-go, mindfulness-based apps have emerged at the intersection of new investment models, state-of-the-art AI and surveillance and border control regimes. Conceived of as a more cost-effective approach to refugee mental health care, mental health apps are part of a larger endeavour to create the ‘smart’ refugee. Self-monitoring, agile, entrepreneurial and resilient in the face of adversity, the smart refugee is expected to emerge as a node in a network of information flow, constantly connected to digital technology, at once receiving and providing real-time data. Biometric and data markets, some of the fastest growing in the world, have already been eagerly collecting refugee fingerprints, iris scans, facial images, etc. To add to this arsenal of data, the new apps are harvesting, storing and selling what I call the mental prints of refugee trauma, turning the human experience of loss and grief into quantifiable and marketable commodities.

This talk is part of the Darwin College Humanities and Social Sciences Seminars series.

This talk is included in these lists:

• AUB_Cambridge Seminars
• All Talks (aka the CURE list)
• Centre for Health Leadership and Enterprise
• Chris Davis' list
• Darwin College Humanities and Social Sciences Seminars
• Darwin College Research Talks
• Darwin College, Richard King Room
• Darwin Lectures and Seminars
• ESRC DTP
• Neurons, Fake News, DNA and your iPhone: The Mathematics of Information
• custom

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