Paper short abstract:

This paper presents a research agenda to interrogate the social and technical relationships between epidemic models and the social realities they claim to represent through outbreak response strategies and explores opportunities for anthropological contributions to modelling approaches.

Paper long abstract:

The 2014-2016 West African Ebola outbreak destabilised established epidemic control technologies and required the development of new norms and standards for forecasting to design effective interventions, mobilising both epidemiological and large amounts of anthropological expertise, and creating new possibilities for interdisciplinary collaborations. As part of concerted efforts to apprehend and intervene on the present, modelling holds a central role in the production and anticipation of possible future(s). This paper sets out a collective research agenda for exploring these possibilities for interdisciplinarity and co-production in the context of anthropological contributions to mathematical modelling. We are interested in interrogating the assumptions underpinning modelling and the kinds of worlds and persons that models bring into being, as well as the political identities and relations that emerge from these assumptions. When future(s) are not given but made, these processes and what future(s) follow from them (and for whom) becomes a concern. Tracing the social life of data from one localised 'field' site, to policy and programming arenas, and back into the field through targeted vaccination campaigns, we propose to explore encounters between different 'cultures of evidence'. Based on long-term ethnographic work in Sierra Leone and working with community surveillance officers and field epidemiologists we explore the social and political consequences of these intersections. Following the process of evidence production through these encounters we will analyse the tensions and possibilities at intersections between different cosmologies, as ways of conceptualising how risk, uncertainty and the future are rendered governable but also contested along this journey.

Paper short abstract:

An analysis of how omissions of sub-populations and political realities from HIV infectious disease models may discursively shape global health finance priorities.

Paper long abstract:

As funding for the global HIV response steadily shrinks, the political landscape has grown more contentious. Multilateral

and bilateral donors are under pressure to demonstrate impact of investments, and increasingly press national health

programs to shift spending to proven cost-effective interventions. The growing use of these metrics represent an effort

to move health aid from the realm of the political into the realm of economics, in a context of a shift to the "model of the market" (Adams 2016, Brown 2015). But mathematical models on which these algorithms are based include significant gaps in their assumptions and data (Davis 2007, Davis

Kingsbury and Merry 2012, Davis 2015, Fioramonti 2014, Gruskin and Ferguson 2009, Jerven 2013, Merry Davis and

Kingsbury 2015, Satterthwaite and Rosga 2008). They not quantify corruption, criminalization, stigma, weak health

systems and more that impede access to HIV programmes (Atre 2017, Davis 2016, O'Neil 2016), and amplify the

discrimination caused by missing data on hidden and marginalized key populations. Analysis of costing tools promoted by UN agencies and used in HIV resource allocation will explore the market-driven assumptions behind them, analyzing how uncounted populations and realities discursively shape priorities.

Paper short abstract:

This paper focuses on the geometric aspects of economic models to consider how the content of economic assumptions and analyses are given traction through the forms in which they are depicted.

Paper long abstract:

The practice of modelling is central to the production and transmission of knowledge amongst economists. In particular, training in the discipline entails learning to triangulate between the algebraic, diagrammatic and verbal expressions of models. Based on ethnography of undergraduate economics education at a university in Northern Europe, this paper will focus on the diagrammatic aspects of these models to consider how the content of economic assumptions and analyses are given traction through the forms in which they are depicted.

It focuses on the utopic imaginaries elicited in these images, including how they envisage 'the political'. It suggests that some of these models emerge through techniques of 'imagination' invoking islands compiled of individuals interacting in standardised exchanges. 'The political' is subsequently located as an outside entity enacting interventions which disrupt the aesthetics of smoothness, simplicity and balance imbued in the notions of optimisation and equilibrium. Thus (dis)order is produced through a practice of temporal ordering.

The paper highlights how these pictures proliferate throughout the course of an undergraduate degree, and the sense of mastery entailed in learning to manipulate them in particular ways. In particular, the routines of performing particular processes with these models are both repetitive and generative of certain senses of satisfaction. Through them social interactions are made legible with the geometric and algebraic forms of models.