Speculative Vulnerability: Uncovering the Temporalities of Vulnerability in People’s Experiences of the Pandemic

While pandemic-tracking apps may form a future infrastructure of public health surveillance, relatively little work has systematically explored the potential humanistic implications of such an infrastructure. We conducted 23 semi-structured interviews with participants from India, the Middle East and North Africa, and the United States to engage in infrastructural speculation about the humanistic vulnerabilities that pandemic-tracking apps may create. Through interpretive analysis, we examine the relationship between persistent discomfort and vulnerability. Such examination yields three forms of vulnerability: real, anticipatory, and speculative. By identifying and defining forms of vulnerability through an analysis of people's pandemic-related thoughts and experiences, we further develop the overlapping discourses of humanistic infrastructure studies and infrastructural speculation. In doing so, we explore the temporality of vulnerability itself and present implications for the humanistic study of vulnerability in HCI and for the oversight of app-based public health surveillance.