R Wehrens
Biographic Data
| ID | 45324 |
|---|---|
| NAME | R Wehrens |
| GIVEN NAMES | R |
| FAMILY NAME | Wehrens |
| SIGNATURE | WEHRENS R |
| AFFILIATIONS | Erasmus University Rotterdam |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6141-9863 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 29 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 60 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 29 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2010 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
What’s Behind The ‘Digital Front Door’? Building a digital care infrastructure in a fragmented healthcare system
With alarming demographic and workforce developments in healthcare systems globally, digital health innovations are often heralded as solutions. Despite promises, empirical work points towards the complexity of such endeavours. Various sources of fragmentation complicate scaling up local initiatives and collaborations between different care institutions. In this paper we take fragmentation as ontological reality and conceptual starting point. Mob…
Explaining explainable AI for healthcare: A Q-methodology study
Technological innovations are being developed and introduced at a rapid pace to manage increasing demand on the healthcare system. Artificial intelligence (AI) tools promise to improve patient access to quality care and reduce work burden for staff. While healthcare stakeholders have shown increasing interest in AI, the complexity of healthcare provision makes it difficult to integrate these ‘black box’ technologies. Understanding and trusting th…
Doubt or punish: On algorithmic pre-emption in acute psychiatry
Machine learning algorithms have begun to enter clinical settings traditionally resistant to digitalisation, such as psychiatry. This raises questions around how algorithms will be incorporated in professionals’ practices, and with what implications for care provision. This paper addresses such questions by examining the pilot of an algorithm for the prediction of inpatient violence in two acute psychiatric clinics in the Netherlands. Violence is…
From Attention to Attunement: Data-Driven Efficiency and Embodied Care in the Intensive Care Unit
Machine learning-driven efficiency is increasingly cast as a way to insure the future sustainability of understaffed healthcare systems. This article offers a glimpse into the potential practical repercussion of efficiency achieved through machine learning by examining how nurses' practices of care provision are reappraised under machine learning logics. Building on a 4-month ethnographic fieldwork in the context of an innovation project in Dutch…
Working With Value Complexity in Healthcare
In this paper, we argue for a rethinking of complexity in healthcare in terms of value complexity. Although widely adopted in healthcare, the positivist roots of complexity theory have thus far limited its applicability to understand the wicked nature of many healthcare challenges. We draw on a new pragmatist approach to contend that values are situated and embedded in practice, and demonstrate how values and practices co-develop in ways resembli…
Sphere transgressions in health and social care: Reflections on the role of the embedded social scientist
Social scientists are increasingly involved in large health technology consortia to enhance the societal relevance and acceptability of the innovations that are developed, tested, or implemented. In this paper, we critically reflect on the role of such ‘embedded social scientists’ in various digital health technology initiatives. We reflect on our experiences in several large-scale consortia and smaller local partnerships we were involved in stud…
Beyond the Queue: Exploring Waiting Practices in the Stories of Patients With Breast Cancer
BACKGROUND: Waiting is an important topic in healthcare debates, mostly discussed in the form of waiting lists and waiting times. In this discourse, the experiential element of waiting stays hidden. Understanding the waiting experiences of patients can help to better understand healthcare waiting practices, which have a large impact on patients. METHODS: We performed a thematic analysis on 12 patients' books of women with breast cancer. We focuse…
Engaging citizens in experiments with computational analysis of patient stories: From unwarranted reductions to meaningful insights
In recent years, citizen engagement in policy and research has gained considerable momentum. In the healthcare domain, patient narratives, through various mediums, have emerged as a valuable source of insight into the experiences of patients and the healthcare system. Recognizing the value of such textual data, diverse analytical methods have been developed, spanning from text mining to narrative analysis. This article presents experiments that c…
The Role of Affective Labour in Expertise: Bringing Emotions Back into Expert Practices
In recent years, a lot of scholarly attention has been devoted to how practices of digitalisation and datafication require medical professionals to work together with different stakeholders, and to how such collaborations shape expertise (Stevens, Wehrens, and de Bont 2020; Carboni et al. 2024). STS scholars have generally approached expertise as an epistemic and social endeavor, but they have tended to neglect the role affects and emotions play …
“And when will you install the new water pump?”: Disconcerted reflections on how to be a ‘good’ Global Health scholar
BACKGROUND: While critique on Global Health is not new, recent years show a surge of criticism on the field's colonial legacy and practices specifically. Such accounts argue that despite Global Health's strive for universality and equity in health, its activities regularly produce the opposite. The epistemic privileging of Northern academics and scientific method, further augmented by how Global Health funding is arranged, paints a picture of a f…
Eye for an AI: More-than-seeing, fauxtomation, and the enactment of uncertain data in digital pathology
Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools are being developed to assist with increasingly complex diagnostic tasks in medicine. This produces epistemic disruption in diagnostic processes, even in the absence of AI itself, through the datafication and digitalization encouraged by the promissory discourses around AI. In this study of the digitization of an academic pathology department, we mobilize Barad's agential realist framework to examine these epist…
Ethics as Discursive Work: The Role of Ethical Framing in the Promissory Future of Data-driven Healthcare Technologies
The allure of a "data-driven" future healthcare system continues to seduce many. Increasingly, work in Science & Technology Studies and related fields started to interrogate the saliency of this promissory rhetoric by raising ethical questions concerning epistemology, bias, surveillance, security, and opacity. Less visible is how ethical arguments are used as part of discursive work by various practitioners engaged in data-driven initiatives in h…
Dealing With Conflicting Values in Policy Experiments: A New Pragmatist Approach
Despite the “turn to values” in Public Administration, there is still a lack of empirical research in situ that investigates how various stakeholders in interaction develop strategies to deal with conflicting values over time. By using a new pragmatist approach, this article fills in this gap by investigating policy experiments in Dutch healthcare. The results show how professionals, citizens, and policymakers differently valued the worth of poli…
Why Personal Dreams Matter: How professionals affectively engage with the promises surrounding data-driven healthcare in Europe
Recent buzzes around big data, data science and artificial intelligence portray a data-driven future for healthcare. As a response, Europe's key players have stimulated the use of big data technologies to make healthcare more efficient and effective. Critical Data Studies and Science and Technology Studies have developed many concepts to reflect on such overly positive narratives and conduct critical policy evaluations. In this study, we argue th…
On Staging Work: How Research Funding Bodies Create Adaptive Coherence in Times of Projectification
While recent science and technology studies literature focuses on "projectification" and its felt tensions for researchers, a surprising scarcity of empirical work addresses experiences at the "other end," such as funding bodies often held "responsible" for tensions encountered by researchers. Actors in funding bodies experience similar tensions, however. While projectification necessitates predictability and individual project objectives, resear…
Conceptualizing the digitalization of healthcare work: A metaphor-based Critical Interpretive Synthesis
From sustainability to sustaining work: What do actors do to sustain knowledge translation platforms
Knowledge translation platforms (KTPs) are seen as an important collaborative arrangement between researchers, policymakers, and practitioners. Yet, their 'sustainability' is a recurring issue. Several studies describe what makes KTPs sustainable, and focus on the role of institutional and contextual factors therein, yet few studies show how sustaining of KTPs is done in practice. We therefore performed an ethnographic case-study on 'sustaining w…
Evaluating the imitation game as a method for comparative research: A replication study using imitation games about religion
The Imitation Game is a new method and, as such, it is important to show that its results are plausible and replicable. We tested this by conducting Imitation Games on religion in a range of European countries, returning approximately 12 months later to repeat the research. The idea was that non-Christian members of strongly Christian countries would find it easy to pass as members of the practicing majority because Christian beliefs and practice…
Epistemic virtues and data-driven dreams: On sameness and difference in the epistemic cultures of data science and psychiatry
Data science and psychiatry have diverse epistemic cultures that come together in data-driven initiatives (e.g., big data, machine learning). The literature on these initiatives seems to either downplay or overemphasize epistemic differences between the fields. In this paper, we study the convergence and divergence of the epistemic cultures of data science and psychiatry. This approach is more likely to capture where and how the cultures differ a…
The Imitation Game: Response to Collins and Evans
Who is ‘in’ and who is ‘out’? Participation of older persons in health research and the interplay between capital, habitus and field
Inclusion and exclusion processes in community engagement do not take place in a vacuum, but are embedded in social, political and institutional contexts. To better capture the interplay between the individual agency of community participants and organizational structures in health research, we use a Bourdieusian framework. The notions of capital, habitus and field allow us to analyse how inclusion and exclusion of older persons in a Dutch health…
Waves, Owls and Boundaries: How to Think About Science and Democracy in the ‘Post-Truth’-Era
The authors’ main concern is the role of science in society in a time when scientific values (which they describe in terms of science’s ‘formative aspirations,’ see below) are being eroded. In this essay, I critically engage with three related aspects of the book: its general _starting premise_, the _problem construction_ that follows from this and the _solution_ the authors identify
Conceptualizations of Big Data and their epistemological claims in healthcare: A discourse analysis
In recent years, the healthcare field welcomed an emerging field of practices captured under the umbrella term 'Big Data'. This term is surrounded with positive rhetoric and promises about the ability to analyse real-world data quickly and comprehensively. Such rhetoric is highly consequential in shaping debates on Big Data. While the fields of Science and Technology Studies and Critical Data Studies have been instrumental in elaborating the negl…
Understanding each other in the medical encounter: Exploring therapists' and patients' understanding of each other's experiential knowledge through the Imitation Game
The ability of health-care professionals to understand the lived experiences of their patients has become increasingly important but has been a difficult topic to investigate empirically because it involves two distinctive research strands: interpretative phenomenological analysis and patient-provider communication. While interpretative phenomenological analysis focuses on experiences and illness narratives of patients, but not on therapist's und…
Teun Zuiderent-Jerak, Situated Intervention: Sociological Experiments in Health Care
Conceptualizations of Big Data and their epistemological claims in healthcare: A discourse analysis
In recent years, the healthcare field welcomed an emerging field of practices captured under the umbrella term 'Big Data'. This term is surrounded with positive rhetoric and promises about the ability to analyse real-world data quickly and comprehensively. Such rhetoric is highly consequential in shaping debates on Big Data. While the fields of Science and Technology Studies and Critical Data Studies have been instrumental in elaborating the negl…
Conceptualizing the digitalization of healthcare work: A metaphor-based Critical Interpretive Synthesis
Health programs struggling with complexity: A case study of the Dutch 'PreCare' project
Epistemic virtues and data-driven dreams: On sameness and difference in the epistemic cultures of data science and psychiatry
Data science and psychiatry have diverse epistemic cultures that come together in data-driven initiatives (e.g., big data, machine learning). The literature on these initiatives seems to either downplay or overemphasize epistemic differences between the fields. In this paper, we study the convergence and divergence of the epistemic cultures of data science and psychiatry. This approach is more likely to capture where and how the cultures differ a…
Eye for an AI: More-than-seeing, fauxtomation, and the enactment of uncertain data in digital pathology
Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools are being developed to assist with increasingly complex diagnostic tasks in medicine. This produces epistemic disruption in diagnostic processes, even in the absence of AI itself, through the datafication and digitalization encouraged by the promissory discourses around AI. In this study of the digitization of an academic pathology department, we mobilize Barad's agential realist framework to examine these epist…
Linking research and policy in Dutch healthcare: Infrastructure, innovations and impacts
The call for ‘evidence-based health policy’ in the Netherlands has to date been accommodated by the consensual policy tradition in this country and by the institutionalised arrangements for research funding, researcher career development and research accountability systems. The aim of this paper is to describe and explain from a sociological perspective how these arrangements for two-way research–policy interactions enable the co-production of ‘u…
Dealing With Conflicting Values in Policy Experiments: A New Pragmatist Approach
Despite the “turn to values” in Public Administration, there is still a lack of empirical research in situ that investigates how various stakeholders in interaction develop strategies to deal with conflicting values over time. By using a new pragmatist approach, this article fills in this gap by investigating policy experiments in Dutch healthcare. The results show how professionals, citizens, and policymakers differently valued the worth of poli…
Why Personal Dreams Matter: How professionals affectively engage with the promises surrounding data-driven healthcare in Europe
Recent buzzes around big data, data science and artificial intelligence portray a data-driven future for healthcare. As a response, Europe's key players have stimulated the use of big data technologies to make healthcare more efficient and effective. Critical Data Studies and Science and Technology Studies have developed many concepts to reflect on such overly positive narratives and conduct critical policy evaluations. In this study, we argue th…
Evaluating the imitation game as a method for comparative research: A replication study using imitation games about religion
The Imitation Game is a new method and, as such, it is important to show that its results are plausible and replicable. We tested this by conducting Imitation Games on religion in a range of European countries, returning approximately 12 months later to repeat the research. The idea was that non-Christian members of strongly Christian countries would find it easy to pass as members of the practicing majority because Christian beliefs and practice…
Understanding each other in the medical encounter: Exploring therapists' and patients' understanding of each other's experiential knowledge through the Imitation Game
The ability of health-care professionals to understand the lived experiences of their patients has become increasingly important but has been a difficult topic to investigate empirically because it involves two distinctive research strands: interpretative phenomenological analysis and patient-provider communication. While interpretative phenomenological analysis focuses on experiences and illness narratives of patients, but not on therapist's und…
On Staging Work: How Research Funding Bodies Create Adaptive Coherence in Times of Projectification
While recent science and technology studies literature focuses on "projectification" and its felt tensions for researchers, a surprising scarcity of empirical work addresses experiences at the "other end," such as funding bodies often held "responsible" for tensions encountered by researchers. Actors in funding bodies experience similar tensions, however. While projectification necessitates predictability and individual project objectives, resear…
Hybrid Management Configurations in Joint Research
Researchers are increasingly expected to deliver "socially robust knowledge" that is not only scientifically reliable but also takes into account demands from societal actors. This article focuses on an empirical example where these additional criteria are explicitly organized into research settings. We investigate how the multiple "accountabilities" are managed in such "responsive research settings." This article provides an empirical account of…
Dutch Academic Collaborative Centres for Public Health: Development through time – issues, dilemmas and coping strategies
While much research utilisation literature shows an increasing emphasis on the added value of structural partnerships, which should facilitate prolonged interactions between researchers, policy makers and professionals, the question of how such collaborative structures develop over time and what consequences that has in terms of collaboration is usually neglected. This paper offers an empirical analysis of a Dutch partnership format developed ove…
Ethics as Discursive Work: The Role of Ethical Framing in the Promissory Future of Data-driven Healthcare Technologies
The allure of a "data-driven" future healthcare system continues to seduce many. Increasingly, work in Science & Technology Studies and related fields started to interrogate the saliency of this promissory rhetoric by raising ethical questions concerning epistemology, bias, surveillance, security, and opacity. Less visible is how ethical arguments are used as part of discursive work by various practitioners engaged in data-driven initiatives in h…
From sustainability to sustaining work: What do actors do to sustain knowledge translation platforms
Knowledge translation platforms (KTPs) are seen as an important collaborative arrangement between researchers, policymakers, and practitioners. Yet, their 'sustainability' is a recurring issue. Several studies describe what makes KTPs sustainable, and focus on the role of institutional and contextual factors therein, yet few studies show how sustaining of KTPs is done in practice. We therefore performed an ethnographic case-study on 'sustaining w…
Linking research and policy in Dutch healthcare: Infrastructure, innovations and impacts
The call for ‘evidence-based health policy’ in the Netherlands has to date been accommodated by the consensual policy tradition in this country and by the institutionalised arrangements for research funding, researcher career development and research accountability systems. The aim of this paper is to describe and explain from a sociological perspective how these arrangements for two-way research–policy interactions enable the co-production of ‘u…
Dutch Academic Collaborative Centres for Public Health: Development through time – issues, dilemmas and coping strategies
While much research utilisation literature shows an increasing emphasis on the added value of structural partnerships, which should facilitate prolonged interactions between researchers, policy makers and professionals, the question of how such collaborative structures develop over time and what consequences that has in terms of collaboration is usually neglected. This paper offers an empirical analysis of a Dutch partnership format developed ove…
Health programs struggling with complexity: A case study of the Dutch 'PreCare' project
Hybrid Management Configurations in Joint Research
Researchers are increasingly expected to deliver "socially robust knowledge" that is not only scientifically reliable but also takes into account demands from societal actors. This article focuses on an empirical example where these additional criteria are explicitly organized into research settings. We investigate how the multiple "accountabilities" are managed in such "responsive research settings." This article provides an empirical account of…
Teun Zuiderent-Jerak, Situated Intervention: Sociological Experiments in Health Care
Who is ‘in’ and who is ‘out’? Participation of older persons in health research and the interplay between capital, habitus and field
Inclusion and exclusion processes in community engagement do not take place in a vacuum, but are embedded in social, political and institutional contexts. To better capture the interplay between the individual agency of community participants and organizational structures in health research, we use a Bourdieusian framework. The notions of capital, habitus and field allow us to analyse how inclusion and exclusion of older persons in a Dutch health…
Waves, Owls and Boundaries: How to Think About Science and Democracy in the ‘Post-Truth’-Era
The authors’ main concern is the role of science in society in a time when scientific values (which they describe in terms of science’s ‘formative aspirations,’ see below) are being eroded. In this essay, I critically engage with three related aspects of the book: its general _starting premise_, the _problem construction_ that follows from this and the _solution_ the authors identify
Conceptualizations of Big Data and their epistemological claims in healthcare: A discourse analysis
In recent years, the healthcare field welcomed an emerging field of practices captured under the umbrella term 'Big Data'. This term is surrounded with positive rhetoric and promises about the ability to analyse real-world data quickly and comprehensively. Such rhetoric is highly consequential in shaping debates on Big Data. While the fields of Science and Technology Studies and Critical Data Studies have been instrumental in elaborating the negl…
Understanding each other in the medical encounter: Exploring therapists' and patients' understanding of each other's experiential knowledge through the Imitation Game
The ability of health-care professionals to understand the lived experiences of their patients has become increasingly important but has been a difficult topic to investigate empirically because it involves two distinctive research strands: interpretative phenomenological analysis and patient-provider communication. While interpretative phenomenological analysis focuses on experiences and illness narratives of patients, but not on therapist's und…
The Imitation Game: Response to Collins and Evans
Epistemic virtues and data-driven dreams: On sameness and difference in the epistemic cultures of data science and psychiatry
Data science and psychiatry have diverse epistemic cultures that come together in data-driven initiatives (e.g., big data, machine learning). The literature on these initiatives seems to either downplay or overemphasize epistemic differences between the fields. In this paper, we study the convergence and divergence of the epistemic cultures of data science and psychiatry. This approach is more likely to capture where and how the cultures differ a…
Evaluating the imitation game as a method for comparative research: A replication study using imitation games about religion
The Imitation Game is a new method and, as such, it is important to show that its results are plausible and replicable. We tested this by conducting Imitation Games on religion in a range of European countries, returning approximately 12 months later to repeat the research. The idea was that non-Christian members of strongly Christian countries would find it easy to pass as members of the practicing majority because Christian beliefs and practice…
Dealing With Conflicting Values in Policy Experiments: A New Pragmatist Approach
Despite the “turn to values” in Public Administration, there is still a lack of empirical research in situ that investigates how various stakeholders in interaction develop strategies to deal with conflicting values over time. By using a new pragmatist approach, this article fills in this gap by investigating policy experiments in Dutch healthcare. The results show how professionals, citizens, and policymakers differently valued the worth of poli…
Why Personal Dreams Matter: How professionals affectively engage with the promises surrounding data-driven healthcare in Europe
Recent buzzes around big data, data science and artificial intelligence portray a data-driven future for healthcare. As a response, Europe's key players have stimulated the use of big data technologies to make healthcare more efficient and effective. Critical Data Studies and Science and Technology Studies have developed many concepts to reflect on such overly positive narratives and conduct critical policy evaluations. In this study, we argue th…
On Staging Work: How Research Funding Bodies Create Adaptive Coherence in Times of Projectification
While recent science and technology studies literature focuses on "projectification" and its felt tensions for researchers, a surprising scarcity of empirical work addresses experiences at the "other end," such as funding bodies often held "responsible" for tensions encountered by researchers. Actors in funding bodies experience similar tensions, however. While projectification necessitates predictability and individual project objectives, resear…
Conceptualizing the digitalization of healthcare work: A metaphor-based Critical Interpretive Synthesis
From sustainability to sustaining work: What do actors do to sustain knowledge translation platforms
Knowledge translation platforms (KTPs) are seen as an important collaborative arrangement between researchers, policymakers, and practitioners. Yet, their 'sustainability' is a recurring issue. Several studies describe what makes KTPs sustainable, and focus on the role of institutional and contextual factors therein, yet few studies show how sustaining of KTPs is done in practice. We therefore performed an ethnographic case-study on 'sustaining w…
“And when will you install the new water pump?”: Disconcerted reflections on how to be a ‘good’ Global Health scholar
BACKGROUND: While critique on Global Health is not new, recent years show a surge of criticism on the field's colonial legacy and practices specifically. Such accounts argue that despite Global Health's strive for universality and equity in health, its activities regularly produce the opposite. The epistemic privileging of Northern academics and scientific method, further augmented by how Global Health funding is arranged, paints a picture of a f…
Eye for an AI: More-than-seeing, fauxtomation, and the enactment of uncertain data in digital pathology
Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools are being developed to assist with increasingly complex diagnostic tasks in medicine. This produces epistemic disruption in diagnostic processes, even in the absence of AI itself, through the datafication and digitalization encouraged by the promissory discourses around AI. In this study of the digitization of an academic pathology department, we mobilize Barad's agential realist framework to examine these epist…
Ethics as Discursive Work: The Role of Ethical Framing in the Promissory Future of Data-driven Healthcare Technologies
The allure of a "data-driven" future healthcare system continues to seduce many. Increasingly, work in Science & Technology Studies and related fields started to interrogate the saliency of this promissory rhetoric by raising ethical questions concerning epistemology, bias, surveillance, security, and opacity. Less visible is how ethical arguments are used as part of discursive work by various practitioners engaged in data-driven initiatives in h…
Sphere transgressions in health and social care: Reflections on the role of the embedded social scientist
Social scientists are increasingly involved in large health technology consortia to enhance the societal relevance and acceptability of the innovations that are developed, tested, or implemented. In this paper, we critically reflect on the role of such ‘embedded social scientists’ in various digital health technology initiatives. We reflect on our experiences in several large-scale consortia and smaller local partnerships we were involved in stud…
Beyond the Queue: Exploring Waiting Practices in the Stories of Patients With Breast Cancer
BACKGROUND: Waiting is an important topic in healthcare debates, mostly discussed in the form of waiting lists and waiting times. In this discourse, the experiential element of waiting stays hidden. Understanding the waiting experiences of patients can help to better understand healthcare waiting practices, which have a large impact on patients. METHODS: We performed a thematic analysis on 12 patients' books of women with breast cancer. We focuse…
Engaging citizens in experiments with computational analysis of patient stories: From unwarranted reductions to meaningful insights
In recent years, citizen engagement in policy and research has gained considerable momentum. In the healthcare domain, patient narratives, through various mediums, have emerged as a valuable source of insight into the experiences of patients and the healthcare system. Recognizing the value of such textual data, diverse analytical methods have been developed, spanning from text mining to narrative analysis. This article presents experiments that c…
The Role of Affective Labour in Expertise: Bringing Emotions Back into Expert Practices
In recent years, a lot of scholarly attention has been devoted to how practices of digitalisation and datafication require medical professionals to work together with different stakeholders, and to how such collaborations shape expertise (Stevens, Wehrens, and de Bont 2020; Carboni et al. 2024). STS scholars have generally approached expertise as an epistemic and social endeavor, but they have tended to neglect the role affects and emotions play …
Explaining explainable AI for healthcare: A Q-methodology study
Technological innovations are being developed and introduced at a rapid pace to manage increasing demand on the healthcare system. Artificial intelligence (AI) tools promise to improve patient access to quality care and reduce work burden for staff. While healthcare stakeholders have shown increasing interest in AI, the complexity of healthcare provision makes it difficult to integrate these ‘black box’ technologies. Understanding and trusting th…
Sociology (22 works) · Computer Science (18 works) · Epistemology (17 works) · Political science (17 works) · Psychology (14 works) · Health care (11 works) · Public relations (10 works) · Philosophy (8 works) · Economics (7 works) · Law (7 works)