The promise of precision: datafication in medicine, agriculture and education

ABSTRACT This paper analyses how precision has become a ubiquitous prefix in medicine, agriculture and education. The accompanying imagination in each of these domains is that “data” will enable greater predictive accuracy through new sensors and interfaces. In this paper, we aim to provide insights regarding the ways in which precision assemblages function to augment and extend existing knowledge and data infrastructures, while also being underpinned by the anticipatory promise of the ubiquity of digital and sensing technologies. We argue that precision is marked by new data production and aggregation frameworks to measure and intervene. At the same time, precision draws on – and augments – established clinical, agricultural and educational subjectivities in ways that depict new logics of patient, student and environmental care. As we outline below, the threshold of the shift to precision is articulated and institutionalized at different points in each field we analyse in the subsequent sections of this paper – namely medicine, agriculture and education. This suggests that precision should be understood as an unevenly realized moment in policy development, rather than as simply produced through processes of technological change.

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