Seeing like an epidemiologist?: mobilising people against COVID-19
Seeing like an epidemiologist?: mobilising people against COVID-19
Diaries and other materials in the Mass Observation Archive have been characterised as intersubjective and dialogic. They have been used to study top-down and bottom-up processes, including how ordinary people respond to sociological constructs and, more broadly, the footprint of social science in the 20th century. In this article, we use the Archive’s COVID-19 collections to study how attempts to govern the pandemic by mobilising ordinary people to see like an epidemiologist played out in the United Kingdom during 2020. People were asked to think in terms of: populations and groups; rates, trends, and distributions; the capacity of public services; and complex systems of causation. How did they respond? How did they use the statistics, charts, maps, concepts, identities, and roles they were given? We find evidence of: engagement with science plural; confident and comfortable engagement with epidemiological terms and concepts; sceptical and reluctant engagement with epidemiological subject positions; use of both scientific and moral literacy to negotiate regulations and guidance; and use of scientific literacy to compare and judge government performance. Governing the pandemic through scientific literacy was partially successful, but in some unexpected ways.
COVID-19, lay epidemiology, Mass Observation, pandemic response, scientific literacy
49-70
Clarke, Nicholas
4ed65752-5210-4f9e-aeff-9188520510e8
Barnett, Clive
b1f2f557-2f7b-4c99-8aec-0b37a57db0c8
30 April 2023
Clarke, Nicholas
4ed65752-5210-4f9e-aeff-9188520510e8
Barnett, Clive
b1f2f557-2f7b-4c99-8aec-0b37a57db0c8
Clarke, Nicholas and Barnett, Clive
(2023)
Seeing like an epidemiologist?: mobilising people against COVID-19.
History of the Human Sciences, 36 (2), .
(doi:10.1177/09526951231170574).
Abstract
Diaries and other materials in the Mass Observation Archive have been characterised as intersubjective and dialogic. They have been used to study top-down and bottom-up processes, including how ordinary people respond to sociological constructs and, more broadly, the footprint of social science in the 20th century. In this article, we use the Archive’s COVID-19 collections to study how attempts to govern the pandemic by mobilising ordinary people to see like an epidemiologist played out in the United Kingdom during 2020. People were asked to think in terms of: populations and groups; rates, trends, and distributions; the capacity of public services; and complex systems of causation. How did they respond? How did they use the statistics, charts, maps, concepts, identities, and roles they were given? We find evidence of: engagement with science plural; confident and comfortable engagement with epidemiological terms and concepts; sceptical and reluctant engagement with epidemiological subject positions; use of both scientific and moral literacy to negotiate regulations and guidance; and use of scientific literacy to compare and judge government performance. Governing the pandemic through scientific literacy was partially successful, but in some unexpected ways.
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clarke-barnett-2023-seeing-like-an-epidemiologist-mobilising-people-against-covid-19
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Published date: 30 April 2023
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Funding Information:
The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The research was funded by the British Academy (Special Research Awards: COVID-19, project COV19\200422, ‘Learning to Live with Risk and Responsibility: Understanding Popular Responses to COVID-19’).
Keywords:
COVID-19, lay epidemiology, Mass Observation, pandemic response, scientific literacy
Identifiers
Local EPrints ID: 477229
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/477229
ISSN: 0952-6951
PURE UUID: 6646b886-1490-4f35-8946-63979c514528
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Date deposited: 01 Jun 2023 16:51
Last modified: 17 Mar 2024 03:03
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Author:
Clive Barnett
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