Figuring Out Exposure: Exploring Computational Environments and Personalisation in Interdisciplinary Air Pollution Research

Abstract

Air pollution is often understood through a composition of different kinds of data that increasingly include personal exposure measurements. This chapter is based on our involvement in an interdisciplinary project in Delhi that is combining computational methods and embodied data to simultaneously map, know and respond to air pollution. We use the concept and method of figure, and specifically the figure of ‘the child with asthma’, to explore the tensions that emerge when participants are both objects (sensing bodies that measure air pollution) and subjects (knowing bodies that experience and respond to environmental exposures) of research. This dynamic relationship allows for different ways of figuring out exposure in public health, and thereby possibilities for approaching personalisation that go beyond individualised notions of risk and harm.