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Paper short abstract

This paper examines a participatory dengue surveillance experiment in Burkina Faso using Mosquito Alert,a smartphone app. Combining citizen observation, machine-learning identification, and expert validation, it cultivates “vector publics” whose attention generates actionable epidemic intelligence.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines participatory surveillance as an experiment in cultivating situated forms of epidemic intelligence. It draws on DengRIP (Dengue Risk Investigation for Preparedness), a collaborative research initiative in Burkina Faso exploring community-based mosquito surveillance using the Mosquito Alert smartphone platform. Combining citizen reporting, machine-learning–supported species identification, and expert validation, the project develops distributed forms of sensing across everyday environments.

Mosquitoes are dispersed, intermittent, and embedded in urban micro-ecologies; no centralized surveillance system detects them as consistently as those who live alongside them. DengRIP therefore mobilizes everyday observation—photographs of mosquitoes, breeding sites, and nuisance bites—linking reports to expert classification and geolocated mapping to produce locally actionable assessments of mosquito presence.

I argue that such initiatives cultivate vector publics: provisional collectives formed around shared exposure to mosquitoes and the consequences of living with them. These publics do not promise predictive certainty or comprehensive control. Instead, they generate capacities to respond amid ecological volatility by aligning heterogeneous forms of knowledge—embodied perception, neighbourhood experience, entomological expertise, and machine-learning classification.

Foregrounding a “politics of propinquity” (Copjec and Sorkin 1999), participatory surveillance operates less as a technology of prediction than as a relational infrastructure for cultivating shared attention and collective judgment. Through mobile reporting, expert validation, and neighbourhood discussion, mosquito presence becomes perceptible and actionable—organising partial observations and uneven expertise into forms of proximity that sustain response within disturbed urban ecologies.