Short Abstract

This panel explores participatory surveillance as both critique and practice. It asks if and how collective forms of sensing, measuring, and anticipating health can re-orient surveillance toward reciprocity, ethical collaboration, and multispecies care in times of crisis and uncertainty?

Description

Surveillance, as theorists of discipline and control have long noted, operates not only through observation but also through internalization. In global health, these dynamics have intensified under regimes of biosecurity, where military and intelligence logics shape how societies imagine and manage “natural” and “man-made” threats. Within this apparatus, surveillance often becomes self-perpetuating – producing metrics and models that evolve independently of their social or ecological effectiveness. Unevenly distributed, such infrastructures frequently reproduce the very vulnerabilities they claim to mitigate.

Participatory surveillance – a practice that emerged in veterinary epidemiology in the 1980s – offers a reorientation toward a more dialogical and situated approach. Developed in resource-limited contexts that have long served as sites of global health intervention, it integrates local and expert knowledge through participatory mapping and narrative inquiry. Engaging both human sentinels and non-human cues, it invites reflection on what it means to anticipate disease across species boundaries and how more-than-human dynamics shape the futures of health. Yet these systems often fall short of their transformative promise. We ask: How might participatory surveillance respond to uncertainty while effectively redistributing epistemic authority and responsibility? How can it engage with more-than-human entanglements and reconfigure preparedness as a collective practice of care?

Proposed jointly by a disease ecologist and an STS scholar, this panel invites empirical and theoretical contributions that examine the potentials and limits of participatory surveillance across health, educational, environmental and other domains. In thinking and practicing a More than Now, we invite scientists and humanists to reconsider how anticipatory practices might nurture resilience – not as prediction or control, but as an ongoing commitment to shared, more-than-human futures.

Propose paper