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. 2024 Jun;38(2):149-163.
doi: 10.1111/maq.12842. Epub 2024 Feb 28.

A pandemic of metrics

Vincanne Adams  1 , Clare Chandler  2 , Ann H Kelly  3 , Julie Livingston  4
Affiliations

A pandemic of metrics

Vincanne Adams et al. Med Anthropol Q. 2024 Jun.

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic prompted critical attention to the performative power of metrics. We suggest that the existential capacities of metrics as a means of pandemic living warrant further consideration. We describe how the COVID-19 pandemic that came into existence as a public health and political event could only have occurred because of the anticipatory metrical practices that were used to transform SARS-COV-2 into a matter of global health concern. By exploring the affective potencies of COVID-19 metrics we show their abilities to engage the public in ways that cannot be contained; in detailing the narrative arcs created through metrics we show their opportunities, misdirections, and erasures. A pandemic way of life persists: a pandemic of metrics.

Keywords: Covid‐19; affective publics; global health; metrics; pandemics.

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References

REFERENCES

    1. Adams, Vincanne. 2016. “Metrics of the Global Sovereign: Numbers and Stories in Global Health.” In Metrics: What Counts in Global Health, edited by Vincanne Adams, 19–56. Durham: Duke University Press.
    1. Adams, Vincanne. 2020. “‘Disasters and Capitalism…. And COVID‐19’ Dispatches from the Pandemic.” Somatosphere, March 26, 2020. http://somatosphere.net/2020/disaster‐capitalism‐covid19.html/
    1. Adams, Vincanne, Michelle Murphy, and Adele Clarke. 2009. “Anticipation: Technoscience, Life, Affect, Temporality.” Subjectivity 28: 246–265.
    1. Anderson, Warwick. 2021. “The Model Crisis, or How to Have Critical Promiscuity in the Time of Covid‐19.” Social Studies of Science 51(2): 167–188.
    1. Benton, Adia. 2015. HIV Exceptionalism: Development Through Disease in Sierra Leone. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

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