Infrastructures change how we know and what we can know. This insight, from Geof Bowker and Susan Leigh Star, is at the heart of my new project Pandemic Infrastructures: Preparing for the Wrong Pandemic?, funded by the Swedish Research Council, which I will do with Lisa Lindén at Chalmers.
Infrastructures for the next pandemic
After Covid-19, Sweden has made a big push to build infrastructures to organize, govern and coordinate pandemic preparedness. Sewer water is now analyzed for pathogens to trace epidemics. New bioinformatic techniques identify antibiotic resistance genes. Metagenomic techniques are developed to identify unknown pathogens.
These are systems that shape how we know about pathogens, and what we know about them. And they embody particular values and norms: about what a pandemic is, where it comes from and what preparedness means.
The last pandemic, or the next?
Of special importance is the risk that we are planning for the wrong pandemic, by building infrastructures based on the last one. As Andrew Lakoff puts it, we need to be aware of the assumptions that underlie the tools we have inherited.
So the project asks:
- In what ways do emerging pandemic infrastructures shape knowledge about pathogens and pandemics?
- How are they constructed and implemented—and based on what imagined future pathogens?
- What values and norms shape them?
- Do they lead to new understandings of what pathogens and pandemics are?
Following knowledge through the systems
Lisa and I will use multi-sited ethnography to follow three infrastructures from the laboratories where they are built to the Public Health Agency, where their results feed into decisions.
Every infrastructure shines light on some dynamics of pathogens and leaves others in the dark. Genetic tracking, for instance, emphasizes the evolution of bacterial strains over the pathways of transmission. That leads to particular ways of understanding, and handling, an outbreak.
Where it comes from
The project grows out of my earlier work on disease surveillance at the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, in Sensing Salmonella and Enacting the Pandemic. It will run alongside Blind Spots in Pandemic Preparedness: Blind Spots asks what the systems leave out, this project asks how they are built and what they do to our knowledge.
More on the projects page.