New Publication! Research Article: Ignorance and the paradoxes of evidence-based global health: the case of mortality statistics in India’s million death study. (Erik Aarden)

ABSTRACT

Quantitative evidence and metrics play a central role in contemporary global health. Mortality statistics, for example, are considered essential for improving health in the global South. Yet, many observers lament that reliable cause of death data is not available for many low- and middle-income countries. The Million Death Study (MDS) in India forms an effort to address this issue, seeking to reduce ignorance around mortality by generating representative statistics by combining an existing, representative demographic sample with an innovative diagnostic method called verbal autopsy. Yet, ignorance is more than the absence of reliable mortality statistics in this study. Social science perspectives on institutionalized ignorance can help unpack how certain paradoxes of evidence-based global health manifest through three different articulations of ignorance in the MDS. First, the study’s simultaneously national and global ambitions intersect in arguments that present ignorance as legitimation for the study. Second, ignorance is presented as instrumental in balancing the need for expertise with the risk of bias in diagnosing causes of death. Third, MDS researchers dismiss remaining ignorance or uncertainty about diagnoses, by claiming it is relative compared to the ‘actionability’ of study results for improving public health. In exploring these various manifestations of institutionalized ignorance, several paradoxes of the MDS as an evidence-based global health project become visible. By exploring these paradoxes, this analysis suggests that studies of institutionalized ignorance can provide novel perspectives on how deliberate articulations and mobilization of ignorance helps constitute evidence-based global health.

Read the full article here: Ignorance and the paradoxes of evidence-based global health: the case of mortality statistics in India’s million death study

New Publication! Computational modelling within EC’s sustainability impact assessments (Titus Udrea & Anja Bauer)

Between control and independence: computational modelling within EC’s trade sustainability impact assessments

Titus Udrea & Anja Bauer

Sustainability Impact Assessments (SIA) are a central instrument for evidence-based policy-making in EU trade policy. Computational modelling is the main analytical tool to assess the potential economic impacts of trade agreements. While modelling has long been undertaken by external consultancies, for recent SIAs DG Trade conducts the trade modelling itself. Against the background of this shift from external to in-house modelling, the article addresses the (perceived) roles and authority of modelling in SIAs. Based on the notion of models as boundary objects and two recent SIAs, i.e. TTIP and EU-Australia, we sketch the socio-technical arrangements of models in SIAs. We then discuss the different understandings of the role of modelling by policy-makers, experts, and stakeholders. The in-house shift exposes disagreements on the character and function of models. We further reflect on the potential implications of the in-house shift for the authority of models in SIAs. Our study suggests that there are advantages to in-house modelling, such as control, flexibility, and consistency. However, these might come at the expense of the perceived independence of policy appraisals.

Research article published in Impact Assessment & Project Appraisal:

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14615517.2022.2112811

New Publication: Special issue on “Kinship Measurements and Negotiations of Belonging”

Kinship measurements structure economic and political inequalities around the world. Although widespread, they are rarely recognized as such.

Behind seemingly unambiguous measurement results, for example from genetic paternity tests, there are complex processes and many small decisions with major consequences. Indicators of kinship as closeness or similarity are invented and established through persuasive visualizations; units of measurement (such as degrees of relatedness on genealogies) are defined differently; evidence is collected, hidden or destroyed, admitted or rejected; different measurements are combined or played off against each other; thresholds of exclusion are raised or lowered. All of these practices have–potentially devastating consequences—on negotiations of belonging: family, ethnicity, nationality, “race,” and even humanity itself.

The special issue “Measuring Kinship” (Social Analysis 65:4), edited by Christof Lammer (Klagenfurt) and Tatjana Thelen (Vienna), examines this productivity of kinship measurements in seven contributions from Africa, Asia, Europe and North America. These shed light on measurements behind immigration restrictions and forced sterilization, inclusive redefinitions of nationality, insurance benefits for victims of traffic accidents, health risk assessments, and decisions about inheritance and care benefits. The variety of measurements in bureaucracy, law, medicine and ritual show that ultimately almost everything has been or could be turned into indicators of kinship: from the similarity of names, blood groups and DNA to the number of toothbrushes in the bathroom or toxic chemicals in the body.

The entire special issue is freely accessible here.

Christof Lammer is a social anthropologist and postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Science, Technology and Society Studies at the University of Klagenfurt.