CoPol: Covid-19 contact tracing as digital politics

The project claims that the Covid-19 pandemic is a constitutive moment in the evolution of digital politics, where fundamental relations between citizens and states, technologies and institutions have become and are being re-configured. 

In a very short time and under great urgency and uncertainty, actors from technology, public health and legal regulation came together to build pandemic response. Societal reliance on data has been fortified through practices that monitor and contain viral spread while simultaneously aiming to open up society and enable continuity of critical societal functions. Within this situation new actor constellations have shaped through new data-driven practices, and on prior national and international institutions, preparedness plans, and technological infrastructures. A case in point is the now abandoned Norwegian Smittestopp app: it was developed nationally, was compliant with European regulations on data protection (by design) and ran on a platform supplied by Apple and Google. 

The project studies digital contact tracing as social and data practice over time and in as comparative perspective. It has four main work packages, each highlighting contact tracing from a specific perspective: politics and institutions (WP1), infrastructure (WP2), public health (WP3) and fundamental rights (WP4). Through workshops, interviews, legal analysis and ethnographic studies, we analyze different actors imaginations of digital contact tracing, especially emphasizing the role of new data practices such as e-health and privacy engineering. Results will be incorporated into an overall analysis of contact tracing as data politics, drawing upon a concept of data imaginaries.