This paper critically explores the research and development of ‘digital phenotyping’, which broadly refers to the idea that digital data can measure and predict people’s mental health as well as their potential risk for mental ill health. Despite increasing research and efforts to digitally track and predict ill mental health, there has been little sociological and critical engagement with this field. This paper aims to fill this gap by introducing digital phenotyping to the social sciences. We explore the origins of digital phenotyping, the concept of the digital phenotype and its potential for benefit, linking these to broader developments within the field of ‘mental health sensing’. We then critically discuss the technology, offering three critiques. First, that there may be assumptions of normality and bias present in the use of algorithms; second, we critique the idea that digital data can act as a proxy for social life; and third that the often biological language employed in this field risks reifying mental health problems. Our aim is not to discredit the scientific work in this area, but rather to call for scientists to remain reflexive in their work, and for more social science engagement in this area.

Social theory has much to gain from taking up the challenges of conceptualizing ‘mental health’. Such an approach to the stunting of human mental life in conditions of adversity requires us to open up the black box of ‘environment’, and to develop a vitalist biosocial science, informed by and in conversation with the life sciences and the neurosciences. In this paper we draw on both classical and contemporary social theory to begin this task. We explore human inhabitation – how humans inhabit their ‘ecological niches’ – and examine a number of conceptual developments that ‘deconstruct’ the binary distinction between organism and environment. We argue that we must understand the neurological, ecological and social pathways and mechanisms that shape human (mental) life if we are to address the central concerns of our discipline with inequity and injustice as these are inscribed into the bodies and souls of human beings.

This article develops the concept of infrastructuring the social by analyzing the uses of local community work in Danish marginalized residential areas. Infrastructuring the social is a concept to describe how spaces are designated as problematic and marginalized and then remade through the creation and materialization of normative and instrumental relations. The article empirically demonstrates how infrastructuring the social works through enacting relations between residents, local community workers and professionals from municipalities, relations which are used to move people along normative trajectories. These trajectories are meant to transport people out of problematic areas, and into closer contact with “regular society,” such as Danish institutions, education, and the labor market. Infrastructuring the social is thus enacted from the outside in, imbued with the normative imperatives of the welfare state, seeking to rework the agency of residents and improve the marginalized residential area. The concept of infrastructuring the social nuances the trope of the “network” by highlighting the normative imperatives embedded in making relations, and goes beyond frameworks of governmentality by highlighting the practical messiness and on-going work of everyday governance.

Digital phenotyping for mental health is an emerging trend which uses digital data, derived from mobile applications, wearable technologies and digital sensors, to measure, track and predict the mental health of an individual. Digital phenotyping for mental health is a growing, but as yet underexamined, field. As we will show, the rapid growth of digital phenotyping for mental health raises crucial questions about the values that underpin and are reinforced by this technology, as well as regarding to whom it may become valuable. In this commentary, we explore these questions by focusing on the construction of value across two interrelated domains: user experience and epistemologies on the one hand, and issues of data and ownership on the other. In doing so, we demonstrate the need for a deeper ethical and epistemological engagement with the value assumptions that underpin the promise of digital phenotyping for mental health.

The purpose of this article is to explore how practices of translation shape particular paths of inclusion for people living in marginalized residential areas in Denmark. Inclusion, we argue, is not an end-state but rather something that must be constantly performed. Active citizenship, today, is not merely a question of participation but also learning to become active in all spheres of life. The article draws on empirical examples from a multisite fieldwork in six different sites of local community work in Denmark, to demonstrate how different dimensions of translation are involved in shaping active citizenship. We propose the following different dimensions of translation: translating authority, translating language, and translating social problems. The article takes its theoretical point of departure from assemblage urbanism, arguing that cities are heterogeneous assemblages of sociomaterial interactions. Through the practices of translation, local community work both transforms the possibilities for residents and disrupts the compositions of urban assemblages. Through this, we argue, local community work creates new opportunities for residents.

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This article offers a critical analysis of contemporary mainstream stress research, focusing particularly on the way subjectivity is conceptualized. The article shows in detail how researchers in areas from biology to sociology and psychology commonly split stress into two concepts, namely objective, environmental “stressors” and subjective responses. Simultaneously, most research also readily acknowledges that stressors are only stressors insofar as the individual perceives or appraises them to be so. At the heart of stress research today, this paper shows, is a situation wherein the binary between the “objective” stressor and the “subjective” response is dependent upon the very subjectivity that is parsed out and cast aside. This paper critically examines this divide and discusses some possible ways forward for exploring subjectivity vis-à-vis contemporary stress research, arguing for the need for entangled and critical interdisciplinary explorations of subjectivity and stress.

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