Paper short abstract

Using the results of an ethnographic fieldwork with infectious disease modellers, I will show the role modelling plays in enacting the current politics of industrial meat production and its alternatives, as well as how modellers navigate the performative effects and ethical dilemmas of their craft.

Paper long abstract

Mathematical modelling of infectious disease outbreaks is a powerful tool for imagining future livestock agriculture systems under various 'what-if' scenarios, widely used at the science-policy interface. The range of factors determining the course and outcomes of ongoing or virtual epidemics that can be examined through modelling is incredibly broad. It includes things as diverse as the characteristics of farm animal species; pathogens’ transmission routes, temporalities and symptoms; effects and limitations of vaccinations; locations of farms, regimes of animal keeping and their multispecies contacts. This makes mathematical models an important source of argument in the numerous debates around agriculture, as they are widely used to assess and project the effects of implemented or potential changes. Yet the outcomes such models produce depend heavily on how socio-ecological relationships are valued and operationalised, as well as on the assumptions that underpin them within the modelling process. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with infectious disease modellers in the Netherlands and in the UK, I will show how modellers have to constantly face two interrelated questions: how to make good models and how to do good with models? I will discuss some examples of how these questions are answered in various academic settings and interactions with policymakers, livestock producers, and vaccine manufacturers. These examples not only point to the complex everyday ethics of doing science of/for agriculture but also highlight the role of mathematical tools in enacting the current politics of industrial meat production and its alternatives.