‘People like you’: contemporary figures of personalisation

We aim to investigate an emergent culture of personalisation in the UK, and associated concepts of the person and health. We want to understand personalised medicine in relation to other personalising practices. Our figural approach will be applied to case studies of both top-down and open-ended practices of personalisation in medicine, data science and digital culture. We will conduct practice-led research to produce additional insight into the role of personalisation. Our aim is to put the ‘person’ back into personalisation and relate people to the data collected from them and on their behalf. 

This will allow us to investigate individuals’ sense of self, agency and identification with others, and to consider the implications of stratifying people when shaping health outcomes and priorities. We will assess whether personalising practices, considered together, are influencing concepts of the person with consequences for individual and collective health.