AI & Community Health
Building People's Tech Infrastructures
The AI hype positions artificial intelligence as a solution to some of healthcare’s most pressing challenges, promising greater efficiency, accuracy, and access to care. Yet as investments and deployments continue to expand, AI both reinforces and recreates a world marked by deep inequality, the erosion of human connection, and systemic bias. These are at the core of the role of AI in society, not peripheral or unintended consequences of its development.
Our inquiry is grounded specifically in community health contexts. We are concerned about the transformation and devaluation of the social fabric through which communities care for one another and sustain collective well-being. Beyond narratives of speed and efficiency, we consider how we value human connection as a condition of care, especially as time, attention, presence, and relationships are increasingly converted into scarce resources in our datafied world.
This research cluster opens the task of making visible the connections between AI and community health, emphasizing the embodied and lived realities of those who are too often excluded from shaping the technologies that directly affect them.
We center context and relationships in designing experiences for deep contextual analysis, where the implications of AI can be collectively examined, and more accountable and situated approaches to its design, use and refusal can emerge.
Big Data
One of our approaches is to consider AI technologies as infrastructures; that is, we shift the focus away from AI as a discrete tool and expand the conversation to include key practices and systems that make AI possible, including data extraction, storage, and analytics, alongside the environmental footprint of the computational power required for AI deployment.
We also approach technology as a site of possibility. In the midst of many crises of care, we explore what is opening for us now, what is made available, and what emerges from practices of AI resistance and refusal.
We propose a shift in the conversation from technological potential alone to the social, political, and ethical frameworks that ultimately determine the kinds of care we envision and want to make possible with and without AI.
AI Applications
High-Performance Computing
