Digitized and datafied embodiment: a more-than-human approach

Human bodies are frequently rendered into digitized and datafied formats. People go online, use apps, carry or wear mobile devices, and move around in spaces equipped with digital sensors. When people engage with these technologies, a plethora of information is generated with and about them. This might include their appearance and their bodily functions, their activities and states of health, and their well-being or their geolocation. This chapter takes up more-than-human theoretical perspectives offered in non-Western cosmologies, as well as in Western feminist materialism scholarship, to explore figurations of digitized and datafied human embodiment. Our approach adopts a material-discursive position. This means we conceptualize human embodiment as always already more than human: entangled and relational with things and places. These dynamic gatherings generate what we call vibrancies: affective forces, multisensory responses, and relational connections that open or close humans' capacities for flourishing. Digital technologies (and digital data about human lives and bodies) are vibrant agents in these more-than-human worlds. In this chapter, we illustrate some of the ways that human bodies come together with digital technologies and digital data, and the agential capacities that are opened or closed as a result. We review digitization and datafication across the life course, as well as in medicine and public health, physical movement and self-tracking practices, and sexuality and gender expression. In dialogue with the literature on the need for acknowledging the diversity of digitized and datafied bodies, we conclude with some suggestions for developing a more-than-human ethics of care.