Paper short abstract:

This paper ethnographically investigates digital, knowledge infrastructures as forms of scientific sociality that are committed in generating new analytics and knowledge sharing processes for the government of human and non-human health.

Paper long abstract:

The paper draws from the author’s experience as an ethnographer in a multidisciplinary research infrastructure set up online in the early phase of the SarsCov2 outbreak. The primary purpose of this scientific collective is to operationalize, through data sharing, the “One Health” (OH) paradigm in the study and management of health risks at the human-animal-ecosystem interface.

OH has been described as the collaborative effort of multiple health professionals and their related disciplines and branches of science to effectively anticipate and respond to health disasters, such as the COVID 19 pandemic. In seeking to implement a systemic approach to health that entangles humans, ecosystems and other life forms, OH promotes a view of science that is accessible, data-driven, reusable, horizontal and cooperative, capable of bringing up a “visionary, pragmatic lifeworld” in which narrow-focused, anthropocentric views of health make way for more equitable and holistic approaches to health inequalities and risks.

The paper aims to discuss knowledge infrastructures for OH application as forms of scientific sociality that aggregate humans, computers, algorithms, health data, and non-human life forms. Using this ethnographic experience as an illustration, it asks what practices amplify best this particular kind of scientific sociality? What views of health and dimensions of knowledge are preferred or restricted? What are the forms of human responsibility fostered? Using the concept of “infrastructural reconciliation” (Barua 2021), the paper reflects on the possibilities of knowledge infrastructures to act as ethical sites for a more comprehensive and equitable reformulation of human responsibility and more-than-human, scientific sociality.