Social Life of Data Analytics
What happens when data circulate beyond the context of their production? The research below traces the social lives of biomedical data, following data artifacts from scientific and policy investment through their integration in everyday practice. While much of this work draws on fieldwork of electronic health records and data analytics integration from inside clinical settings, more recent projects have studied the social lives of COVID-19 surveillance data in their circulation outside the hospital and lab.
Entering the Digital Safety-Net: Electronic Health Records
Taylor M. Cruz. 2024. “Racing the Machine: Data Analytic Technologies and Institutional Inscription of Racialized Health Injustice.” Journal of Health and Social Behavior 65(1): 110-125.
*Winner of the Ida B. Wells-Troy Duster Award, ASA Section on Science, Knowledge, and Technology
Taylor M. Cruz. 2022. “The Social Life of Biomedical Data: Capturing, Obscuring, and Envisioning Care in the Digital Safety-Net.” Social Science & Medicine 294: 114670. [Open access]
Taylor M. Cruz and Emily Allen Paine. 2021. “Capturing Patients, Missing Inequities: Data Standardization on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity across Unequal Clinical Contexts.” Social Science & Medicine 285: 114295. [Open access]
*Winner of the Donald W. Light Award for Applied or Public Practice of Medical Sociology, ASA Section on Medical Sociology
Taylor M. Cruz. 2023. “Data Politics on the Move: Intimate Work from the Inside of a Data-Driven Health System.” Information, Communication & Society 26(3): 496-511.
Taylor M. Cruz and Sheridan A. Smith. 2021. “Health Equity Beyond Data: Health Care Worker Perceptions of Race, Ethnicity, and Language Data Collection in Electronic Health Records.” Medical Care 59(5): 379-85.
COVID-19 Pandemic Response: Disease Surveillance
Taylor M. Cruz. 2025. “The Social Lives of COVID-19 Data: Following Disease Surveillance from Institutions of Power into Everyday Pandemic Society.” Information, Communication & Society.
Taylor M. Cruz and Sophie Webb. 2025. “Social Interventions in Times of Crisis: Community Perceptions of Integrating Social Determinants and Equity into the COVID-19 Response.” Social Science & Medicine.
Additional Publications
Taylor M. Cruz. 2022. “Shifting Analytics within US Biomedicine: From Patient Data to the Institutional Conditions of Health Care Inequalities.” Sexuality Research & Social Policy 19: 287-93.
Taylor M. Cruz. 2020. “Perils of Data-Driven Equity: Safety-Net Care and Big Data’s Elusive Grasp on Health Inequality.” Big Data & Society January-June: 1-14. [Open access]
Taylor M. Cruz. 2017. “The Making of a Population: Challenges, Implications, and Consequences of the Quantification of Social Difference.” Social Science & Medicine 174: 79-85.
Taylor M. Cruz. 2014. “Assessing Access to Care for Transgender and Gender Nonconforming People.” Social Science & Medicine 110: 65-73.