Performing ‘Evidence’ at Scientific Conferences: the Making of Treatment Promise in the Hepatitis C Elimination Era

• In Event: ‘Evidence-making Intervention’: Transforming Implementation Science 1

Abstract

The notion of ‘evidence-based’ policy and practice has been enthusiastically embraced across health and social policy. However, such pursuits are underpinned by range of problematic ontological assumptions about the anterior, singular and stable character of the thing we call ‘evidence’. Drawing on scholarly work on the performativity of scientific knowledge and practices, this paper will reflect critically on practices of evidence-making, taking the dynamic new era of hepatitis C treatment advancements as a case study. In particular, this paper will analyse the scientific conference as a key evidence-making event. To do so, I will draw on ethnographic data generated through observations of key national and international scientific conferences, where the ‘hepatitis C elimination agenda’ has been subject to claim and counter-claim, illuminating the making of ‘evidence-based’ promise in these settings. This paper will focus on the coming together of the social and the material, human and non-human, in these conference sites, to investigate the emergence of ‘evidence’ as a thing-in-the-making.

Author

• Kari Lancaster, UNSW Sydney