Modeling Health Futures: Practices of Assuming, Anticipating, and Forecasting - II

Abstract

Health modeling has a long history. Historian Theodore Porter (2002) has highlighted a 1766 mathematical model of smallpox mortality by Daniel Bernoulli as a precursor to contemporary policy-oriented forms of projecting health outcomes. Bernoulli’s model incorporated estimates to argue for inoculation to prolong children’s life in order to bring “prosperity and power” (275). Since then, models of health have structured sanitary strategies, quarantine protocols, vaccination programs and have shaped medical practice as well as public perception of health and risk. As Ian Hacking (1990) observed, “making up people” through models has a “looping effect.” Disease taxonomies, formalized etiologies and stochastic approximation of “contact,” produce and reify identities of people and populations. As population-based health interventions have risen in influence from the 19th century to contemporary data-driven medicine, dependence on modelled assumptions and estimations of risk have continuously increased to conduct successful near-future forecasting.

In this panel, we hope to gather scholars investigating the histories and ramifications of health modeling practices. In what ways have mathematical models of health incorporated particular economic ideologies and understandings of what it means to be human? How do global health organizations, insurance companies, government entities, and users value – or discard – models? What work does the increased comfort with modelled assumption do within the management of population health, and how are uncertainty and error conceived within such a framework? How do we make sense of failed models (like Bernoulli’s) and what happens to other models of health futures when one becomes dominant?

Individual Presentations

• Connective Data: Markov Chain Models and the Datafication of Cervical Cancer and HPV Vaccination in Colombia - Oscar Maldonado, Universidad del Rosario

• On the Use of Artificial Intelligence and Decision Modeling in Global Health Research and Surveillance in Arequipa, Peru - Melissa Salm, University of California, Davis

• From Numbers to Tissues in Human Biomonitoring: Remodeling Classical Epidemiology in Switzerland - Nolwenn Bühler, STS Lab, University of Lausanne

Session Organizers

• Marlee Tichenor, University of Edinburgh

• Lukas Engelmann, University of Edinburgh