Pandemic Prophecy, or How to Have Faith in Reason

Caduff, Carlo

doi:10.1086/676124

Cited by 59 publications

(36 citation statements)

References 71 publications

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“…Carlo Caduff (, 304) argues that while the attempted escape from the “knowledge machine” of late liberalism constituted an important move, simply turning to its underside— unknowing—locks social science into a dialectics of the un/known. I have traced the loopings that operate between regimes of knowing and unknowing not so much to know more about unknowing as to reveal the politics of ascribing knowledge or its absence to specific groups or evidencemaking practices.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Circulating Ignorance: Complexity and Agnogenesis in the Obesity “Epidemic”

Sanabria

2015

Cult. Anthropol.

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This article examines what is said to be un/known about obesity and the ways in which attributions of knowledge or ignorance circulate in the field of public health nutrition. Risks caused by individual behaviors have been an overstated concern in public health. Obesity, like many of today's complex problems, is determined by myriad nested interactions spanning the political economies of market regulation, modes of agricultural production, the biochemistry of appetite regulation, and changing family structures. Yet public intervention—and the science produced to validate it—remains wedded to a mode of intervening that has limited purchase on the complexity with which it contends. This article draws on scholarship on the social construction of ignorance to argue that the field of evidence in obesity science is fashioned in a way that deflects attention (and responsibility) away from questions of food production and marketing and continues to frame the problem as one of individual responsibility. Rather than discrediting the veracity of evidence produced out of industry‐research partnerships that increasingly dominate public health research, this article examines how the field of evidence has been structured by these relations. It argues that the demonstration of causal relations between political and socioeconomic determinants of malnutrition and measurable health indexes is largely impossible, not simply because of the absence of good evidence but because the existing parameters of good science cannot straightforwardly reveal such relations. This, in turn, is due to the configuration of the knowable in terms of whether knowledge can be made operational.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Circulating Ignorance: Complexity and Agnogenesis in the Obesity “Epidemic”

Sanabria

2015

Cult. Anthropol.

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“…Epidemiologists attempt to account for suspected underreporting of initial cases, which often leads to what one might call “conservative overestimations.” For example, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's September 2014 prediction for the number of Ebola virus disease cases in Liberia and Sierra Leone by January 2015 in the absence of any intervention was nearly tripled from 550,000 to 1.4 million “when corrected for underreporting” (Meltzer et al., , p. 3), a number that was repeated in global media and framed as a “set of ominous projections” of a “worst‐case scenario” (Grady, ). Invoking the unknown is an important strategy for scientists acting as “prophets,” who aim to be “recognized as reasonable and accepted as authoritative” (Caduff, , p. 296). MacPhail (, p. 136) has demonstrated how this sort of dramatic uncertainty, referenced by scientists as “the absence of ‘good data,’” is often deployed strategically to strengthen scientific authority.…”

Section: Imagining the Sequencing Singularitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Portable sequencing, genomic data, and scale in global emerging infectious disease surveillance

Shaw

Sugden

2018

Geography and Environment

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Emerging infectious diseases (EIDs) occur when pathogens unpredictably spread into new contexts. EID surveillance systems seek to rapidly identify EID outbreaks to contain spread and improve public health outcomes. Sequencing data has historically not been integrated into real‐time responses, but portable DNA sequencing technology has prompted optimism among epidemiologists. Specifically, attention has focused on the goal of a “sequencing singularity”: the integration of portable sequencers in a worldwide event‐based surveillance network with other digital data (Gardy & Loman, Nature Reviews Genetics, 19, 2018, p. 9). The sequencing singularity vision is a powerful socio‐technical imaginary, shaping the discourse around the future of portable sequencing. Ethical and practical issues are bound by the vision in two ways: they are framed only as obstacles, and they are formulated only at the scales made visible by its implicit geography. This geography privileges two extremes of scale – the genomic and the global – and leaves intermediate scales comparatively unmapped. We explore how widespread portable sequencing could challenge this geography. Portable sequencers put the ability to produce genomic data in the hands of the individual. The explicit assertion of rights over data may therefore become a matter disputed more at an interpersonal scale than an international one. Portable sequencers also promise ubiquitous, indiscriminate sequencing of the total metagenomic content of samples, raising the question of what (or who) is under surveillance and inviting consideration of the human microbiome and more‐than‐human geographies. We call into question a conception of a globally integrated stream of sequencing data as composed mostly of “noise,” within which signals of pathogen “emergence” are “hidden,” considering it instead from the perspective of recent work into more‐than‐human geographies. Our work highlights a practical need for researchers to consider both the alternative possibilities they foreclose as well as the exciting opportunities they move towards when they deploy their visions of the future.

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“…Appadurai ; Boholm ; Douglas & Wildavsky ; Johnson‐Hanks ; Murphy ; Rapp ; Taddei ; Wright & Phillips ). Anthropologists have shown how uncertainty about public health threats, for instance, may legitimate government interventions in the name of preparedness (Lakoff ), be tied to the emergence of various coping technologies (Samimian‐Darash ), play into scientifically inspired prophecies (Caduff ), or constitute a foundation for citizens’ claims‐making (Petryna ). In these ways, uncertainty can serve particular political and discursive ends.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Uncertainty in the signal: modelling Egypt's water futures

Barnes

2016

Royal Anthropological Inst

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The impact of climate change on the Nile holds great significance for Egypt, which sources almost all its water from the river. Yet the models used to forecast these impacts produce a range of results, spanning from projections of increased flow to the opposite. Such uncertainty, to varying degrees, is a central feature of debates over climate change impacts around the world, and can be put to a variety of political uses. While all scientists negotiate uncertainty in their everyday practice, I focus here on two particular groups: Egyptian and non-Egyptian scientists who are working on modelling Nile futures. First, I examine Egyptian scientists' underplaying of key data uncertainties and link this to their position within national expert networks as predictors of their nation's water futures. Second, I highlight a material dimension to scientists' ability to know, address, and reduce uncertainty. Finally, I argue that Egyptian scientists' selective interpretation of uncertain model outputs, focusing on results that indicate a declining flow, is part of a political effort to bolster Egypt's claim on Nile waters. By exploring uncertainty as a known entity that scientists -not just in Egypt, but in any political context -actively manage, the paper highlights the linkages between the uncertainty of knowledge about various futures and the material, cultural, and political positions of those who produce that knowledge.

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Pandemic Prophecy, or How to Have Faith in Reason

Cited by 59 publications

References 71 publications

Circulating Ignorance: Complexity and Agnogenesis in the Obesity “Epidemic”

Circulating Ignorance: Complexity and Agnogenesis in the Obesity “Epidemic”

Portable sequencing, genomic data, and scale in global emerging infectious disease surveillance

Uncertainty in the signal: modelling Egypt's water futures

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