ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Epidemiology Unbound 1

Session Submission Type: Organized Session

English Abstract

This symposium will explore the impact of epidemiology on the sciences across the twentieth century. While much of the modern history of epidemiology has considered the field’s uncertain status as a ‘secondary science’, or followed the rather technical development of its methods and theories, this symposium will ask for the traces of a distinct epidemiological kind of reasoning beyond the field of epidemiology.

To do this, papers in this symposium engage with epidemiological reasoning as a 'style of thinking' concerned with the dynamics of health and disease in communities, crowds, societies, and populations; a perspective with considerable distance to clinical perspectives on health and disease.

The papers in this symposium will critically assess the following questions in three panels:

- What are common principles, characteristics and aspects of epidemiological reasoning in its adaptation, utilisation and integration in fields not originally concerned with subjects of epidemiological concern?
- How has epidemiological reasoning transformed and disrupted disciplinary traditions and conventions and what kind of problems were supposed to be resolved with such transformations?

This first panel (Epidemiology Unbound 1) will follow these questions with a focus on statistical methods, quantitative theories and concepts, which in their historical association with epidemiological practice have become equipped with astonishing authority and impact elsewhere. A second panel will focus on the impact of epidemiological principles on big data and artificial intelligence, with a third panel considering the intersections between epidemiology and the sciences and politics of information.

Sub Unit

• Organized Session

Chair

• Andrew Mendelsohn, Queen Mary University of London

Individual Presentations

• Statistical Individuals - Christopher J Phillips, Carnegie Mellon University

• The Test Ban –a p value does not separate truth from non-truth. - Patricia Priest, University of Otago

• Disability-Adjusted Life-Years - The Most Used and The Least Understood Measure in Global Public Health - Sid Zadey, Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health

• Not what nature gave us: Epistemic conflict and the afterlives of genetic epidemiology - Carolina Mayes, University of Edinburgh

Session Organizer

• Lukas Engelmann, University of Edinburgh