Hurra, jag fick återkomma till fältvetenskapen i ny text.

Dessa fältgrejer skrev jag en del om för drygt tio år sedan, i anslutning till Hambantota. Där reste jag runt i en vit minivan och mötte bönder och ”extension agents”. Tre artiklar publicerades om detta 2013 – i Geografiska Annaler, Culture and Organization, samt Journal of Enterprising Communities.

I nya texten – ett kapitel in en antologi om algoritmer – handlar det inte om jordbruk, utan epidemiologi. Detta är ju såklart också roligt, smittontologi och tankefrön och så… men denna gång är vi inne på ett lite mer nyktert förhållningssätt. Fallstudien är hanteringen av Covid-19: Vi jämför Storbritanniens Ferguson med Sveriges Tegnell, och ser en skillnad i ansats – matematisk, universalistisk ”generell” epidemiologi kontra fältepidemiologi. Tegnell är en fältperson, vilket framgår i hans sommarprat (bra forskning!!):

In a rare long-form statement on his work on Swedish public service radio, State Epidemiologist Anders Tegnell also presents himself as a part of [the field epidemiology] tradition (Tegnell, 2020). Right off the bat, he advises his listeners to be wary of predictions and projections, and goes on to spell out his biography and professional development, recounting his work as a junior epidemiologist in different sites of contagion, emphasising the need for an attentiveness to the particularities of the site. For instance, the go-to disinfectant in Stockholm may be a potential danger in some sub-Saharan African settings. (110-111)

Här kan vi ju kontextualisera – fältepidemiologin är ett speciallfall av en bredare samling vetenskaper:

This tension between mathematical epidemiology and field epidemiology can be understood  from the point of view of Andrew Barry’s (2013) discussion of oil pipeline politics in Georgia. His rendering of what it means to be an engineer dealing with metals invites a comparison with a field epidemiologist like Tegnell. Both professions deal with complex mixtures that “cannot be understood as combinations of pure substances” (Barry, 2013, p. 138). Thus, the properties of the entities they are dealing with—alloys, epidemics—“cannot simply be deduced from fundamental physical principles”. For Barry’s metallurgist, “the behaviour of metals in the conditions encountered in power stations or aircraft is quite different from any laboratory setting or simulation”. For the field epidemiologist, the behaviour of a virus is a reflection of the social, geographical, and cultural environment. (111)

När vårt kapitel skrevs – två somrar sedan? (minns inte) – kändes det som en rolig upptäckt att kunna applicera (tjoffa in?) de båda ländernas arbete i dessa kategorier.

More broadly, both field epidemiology and metallurgy must be understood as field sciences—a broader set of knowledges that include “agricultural research, zoology, geology, engineering, anthropology and geography” (Barry, 2013, p. 142).6 The thing that unites these sciences, Barry suggests, is that they are reliant on field research—an artisanal and itinerant mode of practice—and do not operate through laboratory work or algorithmic simulations or models. For Barry, field sciences are of particular interest to STS scholars, as they are attuned to the specificity of the case; it aspires to be attentive to the general problem of how to address the study of the particular. (111-112)

Gladast blev jag dock när jag insåg att Tegnell-familjen faktisk enar fältepidemiologin med agricultural extension. Det roligaste hamnar alltid i fotnötter:

While the metallurgist played a crucial role in the premodern era, the modern field science par excellence is agronomy. The formalisation of agricultural extension—not least associated with the so-called Green Revolution—represented a concerted effort to institutionalise the geographical extension of the modernisation front. (Lindberg & Palmås, 2013) Traces of this approach may be detected in contemporary field epidemiology: Curiously, Tegnell was born into artisanal and itinerant field science, having grown up with a father who worked in agricultural extension.

Cirkeln sluten!