Covid-19 contact tracing as Digital Politics

In efforts to counter the Covid-19 threat to public health, data is a central locus around which societies re-organise and mobilise. Co-Pol will study contact tracing technologies in Norway as data politics in the making. The use of digital contact tracing is strongly involved in the political goal to contain the pandemic while enabling trust and opening up economic and social life even after vaccines become widely available. Contact tracing is at the core of Covid-19 politics, and a number of studies of ethical, legal and sociological implications are rapidly
emerging about its societal implications.

Still the complex interrelations among such fields, the meanings, power and knowledge relations through which they are constituted, remain radically underdetermined and unknown. The claim of this project is that digital contact tracing, due to being situated at the intersections of main powerful practices, institutions and technologies, provides a paradigmatic case and starting point, for understanding emerging joint societal and technical orders, their power and knowledge relations, and modes of public legitimation.