Learning to Listen. (Re-)Configurations of Hearing and Artificial Intelligence
The foray of Artificial Intelligence into the world of biomedical hearing has not been short of promises of revolutions and empowerment. Newly emerging AI-based hearing aid applications hail the expansion and automation of human sensing and sense-making. This includes not only hearing aid users’ own sensory experience, but also the epistemic practices of biomedical practitioners. This research project analyzes how the underlying ideologies of AI-based technologies and their subsequent data economies impact the tensions of the necessarily subjective experience of hearing itself and biomedicine’s values of objectivity. It explores the implications of these shifts for changing constellations of authority, and new notions of what is commonly understood as ›good‹ hearing, ›good‹ patients, and a healthy/sick body.
Sofie Kronberger is a doctoral candidate at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Vienna in Univ.-Prof. Dr. Janina Kehr's team Health Matters. Her doctoral research, looks at the processes of datafication, digitalization and automation of medical listening and hearing, with a focus on epistemic knowledge practices and their power relations. She examines the emerging data economies of sound and their social relations. Sofie Kronberger teaches courses on AI in Medicine, Applied Ethics, Data Economies as well as Scientific Writing at the Medical University of Vienna, Sigmund Freud Private University Vienna as well as the University in Vienna. In addition, she gives workshops to university lecturers and administrative staff on how to teach with and about AI in academia.
Previously, Sofie Kronberger was a visiting researcher at HU Berlin, as well as a research assistant at the Dept. of Science and Technology Studies at the University of Vienna. In the latter, she was part of an interdisciplinary research project about the socio-technical construction and the politics of AI in field of Law Enforcement.