Modelling the new “Social”: The evolution of risk assessments at the Centre for Mathematical Modelling of Infectious Diseases of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (CMMID) during the “first wave” of the pandemic

This chapter offers an overview of some of the articles, updates, and pre-prints deposited in the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine’s open access repository during the “first wave” of the pandemic (January to July 2020). It investigates the hypothesis that stochastic modelling is rapidly evolving alongside the evolution of the virus in terms of representing risk in public as the new “normal” (i.e., the “performative” aspect of research, Rhodes et al. 2020). The chapter argues that this and future pandemics will require the continuous development of a combination of hi-tech tools and interactive technologies that allow for multiple positioning (“super positioning”) and deep learning non-linear digital visualizations, live feedback and interactive online databases that give access to communities, in order to achieve prompt timing for the accurate prediction and visualization of the dynamics of the virus on the ground. Accordingly, the chapter shows how modelling rapidly evolved at LSHTM by opening risk assessments from mechanistic singular stochastic models, towards more flexible, multi-sited, combination of models and visual interactive projections. Following this overview, the chapter reflects upon the increasingly important role risk theory plays in relation to the implementation of mathematical models as health policies on the field, within the dialectical terms of integration between anthropology and epidemiology and the enlargement of the scope of research from singular to multiple overlapping “fields” (as in Marcus 1995). By “field”, I refer here to the grey areas of investigation, representation, collaboration, cross-examination, and contestation between various teams, methods, tools, sites, institutions, technologies, and their intermedial combinations for providing more accurate understandings of risk in respect to this and future pandemics. In other words, to the “third ethnographic space” from which experiential knowledge emerges in relation to world events (as in Fischer 2018). In doing so, the chapter sketches an evolutionary line between practices and emerging methods in research, returning to Beck’s heavily criticised “world risk” theory (1999) and its remerging relevance following the pandemic. It briefly touches bioethical considerations of risk and self-responsibility, and the political implications these may carry for our understanding of the “social” in our contacts and conduct in daily life (i.e., “the presentation of the self in everyday life”, as in Erving Goffman’s classic 1956 study). From an anthropological perspective, this in turn gives a new emerging social role to mathematical modelling with implications for interdisciplinary theory and the conceptualization of the “social” within the emerging “world society.”