Modelling in practice: an institutional ethnography of infectious disease modelling

新冠肺炎大流行加速了流行病学建模对社会生活和政策的影响。虽然有研究记录了流行病学建模如何积累了其政治资本，并证明了模型驱动的政策的影响，但对于模型是如何在实践中产生的，人们仍然知之甚少。这一博士项目旨在通过对传染病模型的做法以及不同组织中这些做法之间的差异进行人种学研究来填补这一空白。通过对模特师进行定性访谈，在英国或国外的两个著名实验室进行参与者观察，并对模型本身进行批判性检查，我希望展示当前建模实践的伦理影响，并概述改进它们的潜在方法。

The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the growth of epidemiological modelling's influence on social life and policy. Although there are studies that have documented how epidemiological modelling has accumulated its political capital and that have demonstrated the repercussions of the policies driven by the models, still little is known about how the models are produced in practice. This PhD project aims to fill in this gap with an ethnographic study of the practices of infectious disease modelling and the differences between these practices in different organizations. By conducting qualitative interviews with the modellers, engaging in participant observation in two prominent laboratories in the UK or abroad, and critically examining the models themselves, I hope to demonstrate the ethical repercussions of current modelling practices and outline the potential ways to improve them.