Paper short abstract:

Based on qualitative depth interviews with 28 mathematical modellers engaged in the UK COVID-19 response, and selecting two modelling case examples, we trace how the making of pandemics ‘big’ and ‘small’, as well as ‘taller’ and ‘flatter’, is not simply a matter of method but of politics too.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper, we trace how the making of pandemics ‘big’ and ‘small’ is a critical element in the politics of evidencing. We draw on depth qualitative interviews with 28 mathematical modellers and others engaged in the UK COVID-19 response. Inspired by the field of science and technology studies we orientate around ideas of evidence-making assemblage. To make our story, we select for attention two particular devices linked to modelling which eventuate the imagined pandemic in different ways, and specifically, in different shapes (tall and flat) and sizes (big and small). Our first example concerns the estimation of ‘doubling time’. Our second example concerns the estimation of ‘individual variation’ in susceptibility. Both innovations challenge ‘consensus’ of the time, but in different, as well as in bigger and smaller, ways. One of these innovations breaks through while the other does not. This concentrates our attention on how the boundary work around the constitution of modelling evidence in a time of pandemic might tell us something about the political assemblages of evidence-making which afford some models more life, agency and sustainability than others. How might it be that some evidence-making innovations break through but others get held back or even shut down? Such boundary work is not without consequence for science or for the scientists concerned. Perhaps when pandemics are made big and tall, models and modellers which enact them smaller and flatter can become troublesome, especially when experimenting with less familiar methods which break from the routine.