Organizations, Culture, and Narratives

Culture and Social Analysis Workshop  presentations by 

Shira Zilberstein, PhD Candidate in Sociology, Harvard University
Beyond Corporate Solutionism: The Articulation-Deployment Paradox in Healthcare AI Research Labs

This study examines why AI projects across organizational and institutional settings often fall short of their social goals, using a comparative ethnography of research labs based in a university, a research institute, and a hospital. Prior scholarship attributes the shortcomings of AI to the myopic vision and market-driven structure of shareholder- and venture capital-funded engineering projects. In contrast, these cases reveal the challenges of alternative interdisciplinary and cross-sectoral models of AI development. By embedding knowledge cultures within institutional and organizational contexts, I demonstrate how the mechanisms by which research labs engage with necessary resources and relationships for AI development shapes scientific practices and potentials— including how goals are set, how activity is conducted, and what kinds of healthcare impact become possible. While corporate AI engineering projects are critiqued as fundamentally misaligned with applications, I highlight an articulation–deployment paradox that impacts labs across sectors. Assembling diverse expertise and market linkages is proposed to advance socially responsive AI, however in each lab, these same coordination and multiple-market processes constrain the possibilities of healthcare innovation. This study contributes to scholarship on the factors shaping AI impacts, micro-macro links that influence knowledge cultures, and mechanisms driving the marketization of science and medicine.

Clayton Covington, PhD Student in Sociology, Harvard University
Negotiating Narrative Authority: Media, Messaging, and Organizational Strategy in Jamaica

In 2006, Time magazine described Jamaica as “the most homophobic place on earth.” This narrative has been reinforced by a collection of international journalists and advocates who cite the island’s colonial sodomy laws, pronounced social stigma, and frequent physical violence. But what do LGBTQ Jamaicans think of this? And how does this narrative of exceptional homophobia shape local LGBTQ organizing? Drawing on newspapers, local LGBTQ organizational publications, and in-depth interviews with advocates, I examine these questions and juxtapose local accounts of LGBTQ life and mobilization in Jamaica with the predominant global narrative of exceptional homophobia. I find that advocates generally challenged this narrative using multiple data activism strategies to refute it empirically, reframe the status of LGBTQ Jamaicans, and revise common stereotypes. However, rejecting the narrative was not always possible or strategic, especially as advocates worked to maintain their vital relationships with international donors. And I show how this discrepancy ultimately harmed local advocacy efforts by threatening organizational security. Finally, I develop the concept of critical queer violence to explain how advocates articulated alternate understandings of violence, the role of the law, and the future of queer liberation in pursuit of an expansive understanding of citizenship.