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Paper short abstract

Short abstract: The climate crisis gives birth to worries of tick-borne diseases spreading. This paper examines through an ethnographic epidemiology of affect how the fear of tick-borne diseases grows, spreads and influences individual choices, bodies and policies.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how the expanding areas of tick occurrence reveal entanglements between environment, body, and health in the context of the climate crisis. While Lyme disease has long been a subject of controversy, recent shifts in tick ecologies, linked to altered seasonal dynamics and climate change, extended encounters with ticks into peri-urban parks and residential green spaces. Tick hosts, smaller and bigger animals, change their habitation. New species occasionally occur too, such as the “monster tick” Hyaloma marginatum, bringing in a possibility of tropical diseases.

These shifts are not merely biogeographic phenomena, but infuse socio-cultural landscapes with affects. Such affects shape how people perceive risk and govern their bodies in relation to a danger of tick bite and related health concerns. And, through an aura of fear around tick-borne diseases, influence the official policies on national, regional, and local levels too.

The paper draws on an “ethnographic” epidemiology of affects related to ticks and Lyme disease in Poland. Through it I traced how the expanding presence of ticks, and the pathogens they carry, heard about and/or experienced, becomes a visceral axis through which bodies register climate crisis, as inhabitants, park users, or tourists adjust their practices, avoiding certain terrains or monitoring bodily sensations for ticks whenever they are out in nature. By paying attention to their experiences and foregrounding ticksites as embodied ecologies of health and wellbeing, I show how the affective framing of ticks and tick-borne diseases reflects broader tensions over expertise and adaptation to climate change.