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- Convenors:
-
Luisa Enria
(LSHTM)
Alex Bowmer (LSHTM)
Shelley Lees (London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine)
Lys Alcayna-Stevens (KU Leuven)
Samantha Vanderslott (University of Oxford)
Mark Marchant (London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Sessions:
- Friday 21 January, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This panel explores methodological innovations in the study of vaccine development and deployment, including discussions of ethnographic approaches to vaccine confidence, the challenges of applied research in outbreak settings, research in digital spaces and between the local and the global
Long Abstract:
Recent epidemics, from Ebola to COVID-19 have seen the fast-tracking of clinical research to develop and deploy safe and effective vaccines but also raised growing concerns around growing vaccine hesitancy. Anthropologists have contributed vital insights on the social lives of vaccines and medical research. This work has highlighted the relevance of local histories and political economies, experiences of exclusion and mistrust and social constructions of risk as key components to understand vaccine hesitancy. Similarly, ethnographic engagement with vaccine trials has highlighted both the place of vaccine development in the structures of global capitalism and how medical research projects become enmeshed in local dynamics, producing new social relations and identities. These insights have informed interdisciplinary collaborations, as anthropological knowledge supports contextually approaches to community engagement, trial design or tracking vaccine anxiety on social media. Underpinning this research are significant methodological innovations, including research in digital spaces, work on animal-human relations and new experiments in participant observation. This panel welcomes papers that offer reflections on these methodological innovations, in response to the following questions:
- How can ethnographic and other social science methods contribute to our understanding of vaccine development, deployment and hesitancy?
- What are the limits and opportunities of interdisciplinary collaboration?
- What are the ethical and practical challenges of doing research on vaccines alongside an outbreak response, community engagement or a clinical trial?
- What are the challenges of doing anthropological research on vaccines across different spaces—from the Twittersphere to pharmaceutical companies, from rural locations to international institutions?
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 21 January, 2022, -Paper short abstract:
Based on three case studies, the paper develops an argument to extend immunity beyond individual bodies, shedding light to the politics of how vaccines come to be and who benefits from them.
Paper long abstract:
Global COVID vaccine gaps have made explicit that the access is framed by nationalism and capitalism of vaccine research and development: pharmaceutical companies that develop vaccines, exclusive patent regulations that protect industry profits, and proprietary and non-public pre-purchase contracts between countries and companies. The structures are repeated across various new vaccines, albeit in different shapes depending on the socio-political context.
By bringing attention to the phases preceding vaccine roll out, namely the research and development of vaccines, this paper analyses the political economic structures that shape immunity-to-be. Given that commercial actors dominate the field of vaccine development, a relational approach to immunity needs to shed light on the production process of vaccines and the political economic regimes of scientific knowledge production and immunological research. In this paper I argue that the unjust division of vaccine access is nothing short of necropolitics, the use of social and political power by rich countries dictating how some may live and some must die (Mbembe 2020). Based on three case studies: COVID-19 vaccine intellectual property right struggles of early 2021, racialized recruitment discourses of an international bacterial vaccine clinical trial conducted between Finland and West Africa in 2018-2020, and a controversial HPV vaccine deployment pilot study during which seven girls died in India in 2011, the paper develops an argument to extend immunity beyond individual bodies, shedding light to the politics of how vaccines come to be and who benefits from them.
Paper short abstract:
The article explores the potential for anthropological engagements with the political economy of vaccine deployment through 'insider ethnography', based on our reflections as a surveillance officer turned ethnographer and an anthropologist shadowing the surveillance team in Sierra Leone.
Paper long abstract:
Recent epidemics, from Ebola to Zika and COVID-19 have brough emergency vaccination to the forefront of policy and research engagements. Anthropologists’ contributions are increasingly recognised as central to these endeavours, however they have tended to focus primarily on the experiences and perspectives of those receiving vaccines, exploring for example the contextual nature of trust in immunisation programmes and the socio-political factors that may affect engagements with vaccines. Whilst these perspectives are crucial, anthropological insights also have much to contribute to an exploration of the ‘supply side’ of vaccination— studying the opportunities and challenges faced by healthcare workers and public health officials tasked with running emergency vaccination campaigns within communities. This article offers reflections on one effort to do this in Kambia District, Sierra Leone, by using ethnographic approaches. In particular, the article focuses on the experience of doing ethnography from the ‘inside’, as a surveillance officer turned ethnographer and as an anthropologist shadowing the surveillance team. Through a dialogue between the two authors from their different positionalities, the article highlights both the advantages of privileged access into vaccine deployment processes that such a methodological approach provides and the ethical, practical and political challenges that emerge from doing this work.
Paper short abstract:
This paper provides the methodological reflection on the research of individual's vaccine hesitancy in China, departing from an online ethnography of the Chinese public's reactions to the promotion of vaccination programmes in the state's strictly controlled mainstream social media.
Paper long abstract:
Departing from an online ethnography of China's promotion of vaccination programmes, this paper reflects on the effects of adopting ethnographical methods in a strictly controlled speech environment, in which the ethics and data of the research face significant challenges. The ethnographical research examined in this paper collects the discourse materials and the audiences' reactions from the beginning of China's official propagation of its vaccine development to the further promotion of massive vaccination programmes. Such data mainly comes from China's mainstream social media platforms. Compared with ethnography in practical contexts, the online ethnography of China's vaccination programme finds a relevantly 'open' environment for people to express their potential mistrust, anxiety and vaccine hesitancy through the informal discussions and comments in online environments. This method helps to reveal the public's contradictory reactions to the state's promotion of vaccination programmes when the target of 'vaccinating the whole population' becomes a political agenda. However, the expressions of adverse reactions still face limitations. The cyber police's surveillance and the massive communication of 'positive', supportive public opinions on the vaccine programmes in online environments could define the vaccine hesitancy as the negative, detrimental attitude to the society, making people hesitant to disclose their vaccine hesitancy. Meanwhile, because of the authoritarian mode of policy implementation in China and the derived practice of biological citizenship, people with vaccine hesitancy would still get forced to take the vaccine. In this context, data collection is not all-inclusive, and protecting participants' privacy becomes vital and challenging.
Paper short abstract:
At the interplay between real-time global data-sharing and (fake) news circulation on social media, virtual ethnographies of the Twittersphere can reveal the contested relations between COVID-19 vaccine development, deployment and hesitancy, and the historic entanglements that manifest today.
Paper long abstract:
For the first time, vaccine development is being directly informed by empirical realities of contagion at local scales through real-time genomic sequencing and bioinformatic analysis. Para-state science materialises as interconnected webs of field stations, laboratories, clinical research centres, and demographic surveillance systems, between which flows of experience, resources, and data are shared. The networked communities of scientists, policymakers, and laity involved in the development and deployment of vaccines for COVID-19 can be construed as an assemblage of knowledge that is constantly in flux - evolving in response to emerging biological evidence and social attitudes, yet rooted in colonial legacies of experimentation, conspiracy, and structural violence. In an age of networks, where the unprecedented rate of global data-sharing is coupled with increasing use of social media as a prominent mode of information dissemination and debate, the internet becomes an important field site which necessitates reframing our ethnographic methods. With Twitter now the first source of news for many, providing opportunities for ‘fake news’, media and opinions to ‘go viral’, we can conceptualise the platform itself a vital assemblage, where relations and ideas are intensified and multiplied on local and global scales. Virtual ethnography enables us to follow these ideas through threads, debates and hashtags as they circulate amongst individuals and institutions on the Twittersphere, enabling us to trace the associations between vaccine development, deployment, and hesitancy and the entanglement of power relations that emerge.