Saturday, October 31, 2020

Lyle Fearnley's "Virulent Zones"

Lyle Fearnley is Assistant Professor in the Department of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences at Singapore University of Technology and Design.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Virulent Zones: Animal Disease and Global Health at China's Pandemic Epicenter, and reported the following:
From page 99 of Virulent Zones:
The epistemological advantage of laboratory work lies in “the detachment of the objects from a natural environment and their installation in a new phenomenal field defined by social agents.” Detachment is an incisive term because it captures the spatial movement of material objects from their natural environments into the lab and it also describes how the laboratory reinforces a sociological separation between scientific experts (inside) and other lay actors (outside). Scientists work to maintain their detachment from laypeople—both defending their distinct professional status and protecting themselves from unwanted influences or bias. The laboratory is the tool that enables the interrelated detachment of both objects and subjects of science.
In Virulent Zones, I trace the global health effort to identify, study, and contain the “epicenter” of disease pandemics in China—a project that I show involved not only moving research programs from global centers (Atlanta, Rome, Geneva) to rural settings like China’s Poyang Lake, but also required a shift in the way science was practiced from laboratory-based studies of viruses to field sciences including wild bird tracking, landscape mapping, and geospatial modeling. Page 99 introduces a key conceptual framework of the book: the “laboratory” as a key model of scientific practice. Laboratory ethnographies provided such a powerful interpretation of the construction of scientific facts, that STS scholars often extended “laboratory practice” into a model for science in general. As Bruno Latour put it at one point, “for the world to become knowable, it had to become a laboratory.” Drawing on insights from scholars like Karin Knorr-Cetina (quoted in the passage above), I examine the “laboratory” as a tool that constructs both the ‘working objects’ and the ‘expert subjects’ of scientific research in a particular mode: the laboratory figures science as a mode of detachment. However, the scientists I followed to places like Poyang Lake, I argue, actually produced new knowledge by giving up their detachment, and instead allowing themselves to be displaced by their encounter with the field: for instance, when they unexpectedly came across unexpected practices like farming wild geese for food consumption.

What’s missing from page 99, however, are precisely these spaces outside of the laboratory, such as the wild swan goose farms on the shores of Poyang Lake. As a reader of Virulent Zones, you are as likely to find yourself listening to farmers talking about how they deal with bird diseases as you are learning from virologists about the molecular structure of the influenza virus. In my view, the ‘truth games’ of emerging diseases don’t take place only in the laboratory spaces that are comfortably dominated by experts, and the book enacts this journey into science beyond the laboratory walls -- following the scientific subjects that takes shape when scientists forego detachment.
Learn more about Virulent Zones at the Duke University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue