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 that there is also much to be learned from studying how professionals in the healthcare field affectively engage with this strong European narrative in concrete big data projects. We followed twelve hospital-based big data pilots in eight European countries and interviewed 145 professionals (including legal, governance and ethical experts, healthcare staff and data scientists) between 2018 and 2020. In this study, we introduce the metaphor of dreams to describe how professionals link the big data promises to their own frustrations, ideas, values and experiences with healthcare. Our research answers the question: how do professionals in concrete data-driven initiatives affectively engage with European Union's data hopes in their ‘dreams’ – and with what consequences? We describe the dreams of being seen, of timeliness, of connectedness and of being in control. Each of these dreams emphasizes certain aspects of the grand narrative of big data in Europe, makes particular assumptions and has different consequences. We argue that including attention to these dreams in our work could help shine an additional critical light on the big data developments and stimulate the development of responsible data-driven healthcare.

Revisiting the ‘Homeland’ Through a Transnational Lens

In this paper, we bring our individual and collective memories of Nepal to reflect upon how we imagine, remember, and perform the diasporic nationalism while living abroad. We argue that diasporic nationalism is often framed by the homeland's historical dimensions and through an imagined and identificatory relation to the homeland. In doing so, we bring our learning experiences during high school in Nepal and critically zero in on how these curriculums taught us only a single narrative of Nepal-India relation by grossly neglecting the other side of the narrative. To deconstruct such a grand narrative, we critically analyze the other side of the narrative, which reveals the Nepal-India relation as a 'paradox' between closeness and detachment. We discuss cross-border controversies in which the Indian hegemony of perpetuating colonial ideas overpowers Nepal through political and geopolitical intervention. We conclude the paper with our remarks to mitigate animosities and rebuild the fractured relationship between the two nations.

Gendered Subaltern in Abhi Subedi’s Dreams of Peach Blossoms

This paper examines the consciousness of gendered subaltern in Abhi Subedi’s poetic play Dreams of Peach Blossoms and looks at how Subedi deconstructs the existing historiography to bring forth the issue of gendered subaltern who have been subjected to the hegemony of the ruling class. Drawing on insights and postulations from Subaltern Studies theorists such as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Partha Chatterjee, Gautam Bhadra and others, this paper examines the pain and agonies of female characters that are glossed over in the grand narrative of the mainstream culture. This paper concludes that while exploring the painful experience of women erased from the pages of history, Subedi is focused on the Maiju culture that began since Bhrikuti’s marriage to a Tibetan King in the sixth century and reveals the injustice of patriarchy against women with an aim to make correction in such distortions of history.

The Making and Unmaking of Nationalist Literature from the National Margin

This article reconsiders the established modern Chinese writer Duanmu Hongliang and his first and most influential work, The Korchin Banner Plains (completed in 1933 and published in 1939), from a borderland perspective. The novel is set in western Manchuria, a multiethnic area of northeastern China that borders Inner Mongolia and was occupied by Japan in the early 1930s. The novel has been read by many as a realistic portrait of the natural and social landscape of the grassland and as an autobiographical account of the author's family history. This article disagrees, and treats the novel as a performative form of “territory-making” that purposefully recreates a Han-centered modern nation from its geographical margin by carefully reorganizing a web of intricate and competing multiethnic and multinational relations in the grassland. In particular, as a self-identified Manchu, Duanmu makes unconventional choices of both themes and literary styles to imply a calculated embrace of a modern nation by an ethnic other. Through a close examination of the spatial-textual negotiations in the novel, the article delineates how a classic work of nationalist literature was produced from the borderland and how this work exposes the precariousness and contradictions inherent in the grand narrative of modern nationhood.

Challenging Grand Narrative through Little Narrative: An Analysis of Fatima Mernissi’s Perspectives

In this post-modern world, intellectuals and visionary scholars putting together Little Narratives on a tactical basis for challenging the ‘Grand Narrative. Most recently, religious identification has taken the status of political grand narrative in post-colonial Arab Countries. Social, economic, military, and political failures have galvanized, progressive religious responses to western domination and globalization. Feminism and especially Islamic Feminism, playing its role as a little narrative for challenging the grand narrative of religious authoritarianism. This paper will focus on the work and ideas of Moroccan thinker, Fatima Mernissi in the theoretical framework of Carool Krestan’s Progressive Category. In this paper, the Analytical, critical and comparative research methodology will be adopted with the qualitative research paradigm.