Date:
Location:
"Not-so-big Data and Ebola Virus Disease"
Speaker:
Eugene T. Richardson, Assistant Professor of Global Health and Social Medicine, Harvard Medical School; Attending Physician, Division of Infectious Diseases, Brigham and Women’s Hospital.
Co-sponsored by the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University.
Contact:
Shana Ashar
shana_ashar@hks.harvard.edu
Chair:
Sheila Jasanoff, Faculty Associate. Pforzheimer Professor of Science and Technology Studies, Harvard Kennedy School.
Lunch is provided if you RSVP via our online form by Thursday, September 20th
Abstract:
Big Data heralds the obsolescence of Theory by promising multi-dimensional phenomena in full resolution. It has been hailed as a revolution that will eventually obviate the scientific method. If we understand science (in Foucauldian fashion) as an activity where reality is empirically parsed, categorized, and theoretically explained while simultaneously instantiating power relations, then Big Data further portends a world free of symbolic violence. This paper traces the promise of Big Data for epidemic surveillance and containment, including the manner in which it empirically parses, categorizes, and theoretically explains large swaths of human suffering. I conclude that its methodology is mainly a recycling of the claim that "more numbers mean more objectivity" in a move to invest neoliberal, bourgeois views of the world with scientific legitimacy. As such, the paper helps explain how such suffering continues despite enormous economic and technological progress in the Global North, while unveiling the process by which our moral norms are tempered.
Biography:
Eugene Richardson, MD, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School and an Attending Physician in the Division of Infectious Diseases at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. He is also a Faculty Associate at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs and a Faculty Affiliate at the Center for African Studies at Harvard University. Dr. Richardson received his MD from Cornell University Medical College and his PhD in Anthropology from Stanford University. He completed his residency in Internal Medicine and fellowship in Infectious Diseases and Geographic Medicine at Stanford University Medical Center.
Dr. Richardson previously served as the clinical lead for Partners in Health’s Ebola response in Kono District, Sierra Leone, where he continues to conduct mixed-methods research projects related to the 2014-16 Ebola outbreak. His overall focus is on biosocial approaches to epidemic disease prevention, containment, and treatment in sub-Saharan Africa. He was recently awarded a Burke Global Health Fellowship from the Harvard Global Health Institute and was selected to be a Visiting Scholar at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, NJ. He is currently writing a book examining the role discursive power in propagating infectious disease outbreaks.
