In recent years and across many nations, public health has become subject to forms of governance that are said to be aimed at establishing accountability. In this introduction to a special issue, From Person to Population and Back: Exploring Accountability in Public Health, we suggest opening up accountability assemblages by asking a series of ostensibly simple questions that inevitably yield complicated answers: What is counted? What counts? And to whom, how and why does it count? Addressing such questions involves staying attentive to the technologies and infrastructures through which data come into being and are made available for multiple political agendas. Through a discussion of public health, accountability and datafication we present three key themes that unite the various papers as well as illustrate their diversity.
Keywords: accountability; big data; data; datafication; population; public health.