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Paper short abstract:

This paper presents a research agenda to interrogate the social and technical relationships between epidemic models and the social realities they claim to represent through outbreak response strategies and explores opportunities for anthropological contributions to modelling approaches.

Paper long abstract:

The 2014-2016 West African Ebola outbreak destabilised established epidemic control technologies and required the development of new norms and standards for forecasting to design effective interventions, mobilising both epidemiological and large amounts of anthropological expertise, and creating new possibilities for interdisciplinary collaborations. As part of concerted efforts to apprehend and intervene on the present, modelling holds a central role in the production and anticipation of possible future(s). This paper sets out a collective research agenda for exploring these possibilities for interdisciplinarity and co-production in the context of anthropological contributions to mathematical modelling. We are interested in interrogating the assumptions underpinning modelling and the kinds of worlds and persons that models bring into being, as well as the political identities and relations that emerge from these assumptions. When future(s) are not given but made, these processes and what future(s) follow from them (and for whom) becomes a concern. Tracing the social life of data from one localised 'field' site, to policy and programming arenas, and back into the field through targeted vaccination campaigns, we propose to explore encounters between different 'cultures of evidence'. Based on long-term ethnographic work in Sierra Leone and working with community surveillance officers and field epidemiologists we explore the social and political consequences of these intersections. Following the process of evidence production through these encounters we will analyse the tensions and possibilities at intersections between different cosmologies, as ways of conceptualising how risk, uncertainty and the future are rendered governable but also contested along this journey.