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Paper short abstract:

What happens when drones, hand-held GPSs and cameras meet forest habitats, mosquitoes, macaques and people? I reflect on the experience of working in a large multi-disciplinary team mapping malaria ‘risk’ in Malaysian Borneo and the implications for understanding zoonotic diseases like Covid-19.

Paper long abstract:

I describe how an international, multidisciplinary team of researchers working on the MONKEYBAR project deployed a range of technologies try to understand how the macro-movements of environments, forests and habitats intersected with the micro-movement of people, macaques and mosquitoes to shape how zoonotic malaria was transmitted and spread in Malaysian Borneo. Carried by long and pig-tailed macaques, Plasmodium knowlesi is a primate malaria transmitted to people through bites from infected Anopheles leucosphyrus mosquitoes and is now a significant cause of malaria in Malaysia and across the South East Asia region. Drones, modelling data and GPS trackers were used to gaze on zoonotic disease transmission dynamics from above while digital cameras, GPS trackers and interviews reversed the gaze from below. Put together, locally-relevant risk maps created from the data gave us a multi-scalar, multi-temporal, multi-species view of the complex interactions that coalesced here to create ‘conditions of pathogenic possibility’. (Brown and Kelly, 2014). Of significance is the way in which ‘mappers’ approached and interpreted the issue of ‘risk’ from different experiential, disciplinary, spatial, temporal and species vantage points and how these tensions were resolved (or not) to come to collective elucidations of the fuzzy notion of ‘risk’. What became clear was that ‘risky’ places did not exist as fixed areas but rather had a mobility of their own as they emerged and receded from view as a result of an array of movements from those implicated in the mapping process. I reflect on what can be cleaned in relation to Covid-19.