On the talk „Have You Been Tested?“

In this presentation, I identify three aspects of testing, drawn from the sociology of testing. First, tests are frequently proxies (or projections) that stand for something. Second, a test is a critical moment that stands out – whether because it is a moment deliberately separated out or because it is a puzzling or troublesome “situation” that disrupts the flow of social life. Third, when someone or something is put to the test, of interest is whether it stands up to the challenge. These insights serve as the building blocks for addressing three major issues – representation, selection, and accountability – regarding testing in the time of the coronavirus crisis.

On the speaker:

David Stark (Columbia University)

On the lecture series: „Testing Infrastructures“

From QR codes used to verify COVID-19 vaccination status’ to cloud software used to train machine learning models, infrastructures of testing are proliferating. Whilst the infrastructures themselves come in different forms – from ‘off the shelf’ systems to tailor-made technologies – they all have a capacity to generate specific ‘test situations’ involving an array of different actors from ‘ghost’ workers to python scripts. An increasing reliance on digital platforms, protocols, tools, and procedures has led to a redistribution of testing itself: not just where testing takes place, and who performs the testing, but who has access to, and control over, mechanisms for testing, test protocols and of course, test results. In this lecture series, we focus on the practices making up the test infrastructures and explore different perspectives to make sense of the realities enacted by testing.

We invite our lecture guests to ask: how do testing infrastructures engender the construction of specific testing routines and practices? What kinds of affective experiences, reactions, and responses are generated through testing? Here we invite reflection on how testing infrastructures oft fade into the background, pointing to a tapestry of maintenance and repair practices. Lastly, what are the ways in which we can evaluate the role of digital infrastructures more broadly? This includes the challenge of what novel test methods can be developed and actually ‘tested’ to gain a better understanding of how infrastructures work. Our exploration of test practices in this context is interwoven with the search for test media that bind actors together or create barriers; that enable cooperation or declare it impossible.

Possible questions include (but are not limited to):

• What are the implications of testing in different social situations and in what moments do they come to the fore? 

• When and where are tests conducted—for whom and what, through whom and what, and by whom and what actors?

• What are digital practices for/of testing and with what types of data do testing infrastructures support?

• What other practices spawn from distributed testing? Think of practices of passing and obfuscation within nested situations of testing and the outsourcing of ‘validation work’ as constructions that govern.

• What methodological strategies are there to make test procedures and their foundations transparent?

• Can different politics of testing be distinguished? If so, where and under what conditions?

• Can we demarcate between embodied testing and disembodied testing?