Antivirals, Archives and AI: How Can Gender Health Inequalities in the Pandemic be Possible?

Wednesday, 15 November 2023
14.00 - 15.00 CET
This is an online event

With online/archival methods used in political and health studies, we are on the way to exploring the role of web archives. In this presentation, Chen Qu will introduce how she combined programming-powered analysis of health & medicine datasets that archived reports, blogs, and so forth, and thematic analysis in her study on gender inequalities in health during the pandemic, especially in the UK.

Her project can contribute to data use, public health and feminist geography from three facets:

1) unstructured archives can influence a research project on specific topics, limited by data cleansing and ethical considerations of online research.

2) the dataset shows the priorities in female health (inequalities) during the pandemic in the UK concentrated on vaccines, NHS support, and other gender-related healthcare topics such as LGBTQ+ rights. This can complete the research agenda picture of medical inequalities and enhance our understanding of the complex interplay in health equalities of gender, identities and everyday practices of living with uncertainty. Chen Qu thus proposes a crisis geography perspective that stresses an ‘ordinary preparedness’ functioned by planning and infrastructure across sectors considering the vulnerable.

3) through a critical lens, despite the fault of e-archive uses in health geographies, the potential of the use of AI in later studies especially for text analysis cannot be denied.

Keywords: digital health, web archives, programming/AI-powered methods, big data, gender health inequalities, Covid-19, crisis geography/governance.

Speaker: Chen Qu, Visiting Research Fellow at UNU-CRIS and Lecturer at University of Cambridge
 

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