ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Epidemiology Unbound 3

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 third panel (Epidemiology Unbound 3) maps the intersection between forms of epidemiological reasoning and the emergence of the information sciences in the second half of the twentieth century, considering how the spread of information was epidemiologically theorised and how 'infodemics' emerged. The first panel in this symposium focuses on the spread of statistical methods and the second follows the uptake of epidemiological principles in data science.

Sub Unit

• Organized Session

Chair

• Alex Csiszar, Harvard University

Individual Presentations

• Science as Schistosomiasis. From the ‘Ecology of Medical Literature’ to Infodemics. - Lukas Engelmann, University of Edinburgh

• Going viral: Epidemiological reasoning and the making of the COVID-19 infodemic - Giulia Villanucci

• Applying Epidemiological Reasoning to Epistemic Dissent in Large-Scale Scientific Collaborations - Paula Muhr, Brand University of Applied Sciences

Session Organizer

• Lukas Engelmann, University of Edinburgh