Claudia Lang deliveedr a lecture on ‘Dreaming Big with Little Therapy Devices: Automated Therapy from India’. It was chaired by Prathama Banerjee.
ZOOM ID: 87414259948 PASSCODE: csdsdelhi
This talk examines the aspirations, imaginaries and utopias of designers of an AI-based mental health app in India. By looking at automated therapy as both technological fix and sociotechnical object, the speaker asks, What can we learn from engaging with psy technologists’ imaginaries and practices of health care futures? What are the assumptions they encode in the app? How does automated therapy reconfigure the geographies and temporalities of care? While automated therapy as instantiated by Wysa provides, she argues, a modest mental health intervention, the scalar aspirations of designers are anything but small.
Claudia Lang is a medical anthropologist at the University of Leipzig. Her research focuses on the reconfiguration of mental health and care through digitization in India. Other research areas include global health, depression, Ayurveda, and ecological grief. She is the author of Depression in Kerala, co-author of Global Health for All, and of The Movement for Global Mental Health.
Awadhendra Sharan is Director, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi.
Thursday, 29 August 2024, 4.30 pm, Zoom https://bit.ly/3Afndcx
