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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.