Paper short abstract:

In my presentation, I will discuss the results of a brief explorative ethnographic study focusing on the differences present within epidemiology and the more-than-human infrastructures that afford them. This study forms a ground for a future larger project on infectious disease modelling.

Paper long abstract:

The COVID-19 pandemic has shown the urgency of a critical engagement with epidemiology as it has come to have a wide-ranging influence on social life and policy. Although previous scholarship in social sciences has shown how epidemiology has accumulated its political capital and demonstrated the repercussions of the policies driven by different infectious disease models, still little is known about how it is done in practice. In STS epidemiology has long attracted attention mainly as a cornerstone of enactment of health as contained in populations rather than individual bodies (Law and Mol 2008). But the pandemic has highlighted the contingency and diversity of approaches within epidemiology itself with various infectious disease models competing for attention. These differences within epidemiology are yet to be thoroughly addressed by STS. In my presentation, I would like to discuss the results of a brief explorative ethnographic study with which I am trying to make a first step towards filling in this gap. I do so by examining how epidemiology is taught and done in practice through participant observation at an undergraduate course in epidemiology, within an epidemiological research group, and at an open lecture series. With this study, I distinguish between various modes of doing epidemiology and contrasting enactments of body and disease they lead to, as well as reflect on the role of more-than-human infrastructures in this process. This study is an initial step in a larger ethnographic project on infectious disease modelling the plans for which I will discuss during the presentation.