10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17464
What can STS say about the pandemic? What kind of scientific models do we need to question our time? In this reflection I envision three issues which seem to me of particular importance: (1) the “social” as a result of sociomaterial associations; 2) science as an open-air laboratory; 3) the new forms of alliances between science and politics. I conclude focusing on the theme of interdisciplinarity, the major challenge that the pandemic poses to science.
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Assunta Viteritti
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Tecnoscienza – Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
politics
An STS Perspective on Pandemic
Text.Serial.Journal
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Lectures
2020-11-12
2023-06-27
2020-11-12
2023-10-12
69-78
TS
Assunta Viteritti
2020/11/12
10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17464
69
Sapienza Università di Roma
2038-3460
1
politics
en
78
An STS Perspective on Pandemic
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/article/download/17464/16313
11
                                                            Presidential Address
                                                                                      69




An STS Perspective on Pandemic1
Assunta Viteritti
Sapienza Università di Roma



    Abstract: What can STS say about the pandemic? What kind of scientific
    models do we need to question our time? In this reflection I envision three
    issues which seem to me of particular importance: (1) the ‘social’ as a result
    of sociomaterial associations; 2) science as an open-air laboratory; 3) the new
    forms of alliances between science and politics. I conclude focusing on the
    theme of interdisciplinarity, the major challenge that the pandemic poses to
    science.
    Keywords: pandemic; associations; sociomateriality; interdisciplinarity;
    politics.

    Submitted: May 30, 2020 – Accepted: June 30, 2020

    Corresponding author: Assunta Viteritti, DiSSE – Dipartimento di Scienze
    Economiche e Sociali, University of Rome, Via Salaria, 113, 00198 Rome, Italy.
    Email: assunta.viteritti@uniroma1.it




    What can STS say about the pandemic? What kind of scientific models
do we need to question our time?
    My impression is that the pandemic we are witnessing points to three
major issues: 1) the ‘social’ as a result of sociomaterial associations; 2)
science as an open-air laboratory; 3) the new forms of alliances between
science and politics.
    I will now try to sketch them in some details.


1. Sociomaterial associations: or, the allies in the virus’
journey
   We are part of fragile, multilayer ecosystems. They are stratified
archaeologies that come together in a shaky, non-inclusive, non-linear,
non-stable way.


 TECNOSCIENZA
 Italian Journal of Science and Technology Studies
 11 (1) pp. 68-78 - ISSN 2038-3460
 www.tecnoscienza.net                                2020
70                                                                Tecnoscienza – 11 (1)

    STS provided a shift away from any essentialist tendency, highlighting
how every scientific idea, every technical artifact, every social fact, every
event of the living are the product of entangled networks of relations in
which human and non-human interact. To see closely the associations
between human and material we can look at two of the social spheres most
involved in the pandemic: education and healthcare.
    Some images from China (figure 1)2 – the first country that translated
the rules of physical distancing within the material spaces of classrooms –
show how protective and safety objects have been added to the traditional
‘frontal’ organization of classroom space (the ‘one to many’ learning
model). The dividers separate students from each other, suggesting a
relationality inspired by control, vigilance, surveillance, but also by safety,
protection, and prevention. Dividers, benches, bulkheads, and protective
devices (gloves and masks) worn by young girls and boys reconfigure the
school space in terms of protection, inscribing morality and values, as well
as new environmental and relational constraints.




                     Figure 1. School space post-covid in China



   Looking at the medical field, the second image3 shows a micro-
environment of bio-protection in which different elements (gloves, bed,
plastic-coated walls) are assembled so to allow healthcare workers to
operate safely, protecting the patient at the same time.
Viteritti                                                                    71




                   Figure 2. Micro-environment of bio-protection



    The image shows associations, entanglements and inscriptions between
norms, ethics and knowledges that enact emergency and routine practices
in bio-medical settings.
    The other photo (figure 3) shows new risks and missing alliances.
Technical objects, such as protective masks and gloves, placed into the
chains of daily practices, do not find other connections after their use, but
are placed in other types of connections and associations that feed the
already serious environmental issues. These objects activate relational
effects that can be described in other words: environmental risk, pollution,
non-disposal, danger.




            Figure 3. Mask and plastic gloves (photo taken by the author).
72                                                            Tecnoscienza – 11 (1)


    In this case, similar objects – arranged in different ways and seen in
their relational effects – show new alliances or rather deficit of alliances
and risks: similar objects and opposite effects.
    According to Latour4, the virus is only one node within a network. The
virus highlights the interconnection between two crises, the health and
environmental one, showing that the classic definition of society as
something made exclusively of human entities no longer makes sense. The
so-called ‘society’ depends on associations between many and
heterogeneous actors, most of which do not have human form. This applies
to microbes (Latour, 1993) but also to the Internet, the law, the welfare
State, as well as to the climate change.
Viruses, animals, markets, men, women, sick people, elders, children,
States, money, airplanes, cells, air, antibodies, politicians, hospitals, masks,
swabs, gowns, food, drugs, vaccines, scientists (virologists, anesthetists,
infectious      disease     specialists,   veterinarians,      pharmacologists,
pneumatologists, epidemiologists, economists, sociologists, statisticians),
nurses, doctors, protocols, decrees, rules, apps, data, big data, databases,
standards, procedures, numbers, corpses, breaths, lungs. With all these
elements we have built a new familiarity over the last ten months. They
might seem arbitrary, yet we have learned to grasp them as part of an
inextricable and vulnerable sociomaterial network on a global scale, in
search of stable connections. Only if we look at how these elements
associate with each other can we capture the multiplicity of associations in
which we are immersed.
      As Donna Haraway argued5, just by understanding the chains of
associations as natureculture – as elements that are not separated from each
other – we can shift away from the centrality of the human being. The
emphasis on these associations can be caught in the journey of the virus
that triggered the pandemic. We have heard that it would be a product of
evolution and certainly not a "artificial construction" in the laboratory. But
what is actually "natural" if we are dealing with an event that has been
facilitated, activated, amplified by actions that involve the human animal
as well? In what sense can the natural be separated from the human in this
story? What is there of non-human in this "natural" that would belong to
the virus only?
      Through the narration of the many scientists, science journalists,
experts who have intervened in the public media space on a global level we
have learned that there was not a single trigger event, or a cause, or a
singular culprit. Rather, a chain of events occurred that have become both
causes and effects.
      Like many viruses, the SARS-COV-2 (commonly known as
“Coronavirus”) travelled around the world and among living species
(humans, animals) and other material elements. David Quammen's book
Spillover (2012) offers various examples of such a process. Spillover brings
attention to all the times that humans have violated spaces, appropriated
Viteritti                                                                           73

resources, invaded ecosystems and brought events such as forced
deforestation, urbanization and global warming that caused the release of
viruses from animals – whose ecosystems have been violated – to other
species and humans.
     The first case we encounter concerns the measles of horses that broke
out in September 1994 in a suburb of the north of Brisbane, Australia,
called Hendra (the name that will take the virus). Hendra is a quiet old
town, full of racetracks, horse lovers, wooden houses converted into
stables, newsstands that sold sheets specialized in horse betting and coffee.
But what triggered the virus? In his reconstruction, the author follows the
associations between humans, nature and animals:

                 After our first conversation, at a café in Hendra, Peter Reid
            drove me several miles southeast, across the Brisbane River, to the
            site where Drama Series took sick. It was in an area called Cannon
            Hill, formerly pastoral land surrounded by city, now a booming
            suburb just off the M1 motorway. Tract houses on prim lanes had
            been built over the original paddock. Not much of the old
            landscape remained. But toward the end of one street was a circle,
            called Calliope Circuit, in the middle of which stood a single mature
            tree, a Moreton Bay fig, beneath which the mare would have found
            shelter from eastern Australia’s fierce subtropical sun. “That’s it,”
            Reid said. “That’s the bloody tree.” That’s where the bats gathered,
            he meant. (ivi, 14)

    The "bloody tree" was left alone where once there was "pastoral land
surrounded by city" in which many other trees probably grew. Now it was
the only one under which horses could shelter from the heat, and the only
one for bats to take refuge.
    We have found similar traces in the narration performed by several
scientists in recent months. The international virologist Ilaria Capua (2020)
spoke of the Coronavirus as a product of our world, of a violated forest, of
a market where animals belonging to different ecosystems are locked alive
in captivity in the same cages. Imprisoned by humans, the bat and the
pangolin exchange viral agents, so that the latter could have become the
involuntary "intermediate host" of the new Coronavirus, the bridge for the
leap of species of the virus from bat to man. Pangolins seem to lack defense
systems against viral infections but they tolerate them, thus becoming
reservoirs of microbes while protecting themselves from their effects.
    The beginning of the virus journey suddenly produced new
associations: planes, trips, airports, ships, sick people, hospitals, dead
people, quarantine. Time and space have entered into a powerful short-
circuit: the SARS-COV-2 walked with our fast feet and planes, and moved
immediately on a global scale from East to West (at first it was called "the
virus of the rich", the virus in a suit and tie). The virus associated very well
with the main feature of the contemporary and its mobile lives (Elliott and
74                                                            Tecnoscienza – 11 (1)

Urry 2013): a mobility that made it travel, using humans as a vehicle – first
to the Western routes and then to the rest of the world6.


2. A global open-air laboratory
    Scientific research invites us to follow new processes in order to
produce a sort of domestication of the virus. Both in the public and
professional (health) spheres, new technical objects come into play with
their attempts to contain, manage or mediate the action of the virus, while
contributing to redefining the concept of public health and individual well-
being. Masks, soap, disinfectants, gowns, gloves, buffers, bulkheads and
tools to promote physical distancing, and then reagents, respirators,
serums, and so on have entered the scene incorporating, in different ways,
imperatives for individual and collective behavior. We learn to live with
these objects in order to live with the virus.
    Scientists in recent months have found themselves under enormous
exposure in the social space. Politicians and public opinion struggle to
understand the uncertainty with which scientists are confronted in their
work. Politicians and citizens want “ready-made” science and resist
looking at the unstable, in-action construction of scientific knowledge. Yet,
scientific research in the laboratory lives on uncertainties, doubts,
approximations, data to analyze and interpretations of phenomena that
scientists try to tame. No science is ready-made in the laboratory. Science
is always in its making, more or less stabilized. In this phase, science in all
of its components is indeed in a process of construction, in progress. The
construction of science is an uncertain process in search of evidence to
build forms of stability that are never permanent: the instability of scientific
knowledge is one of its foundations.
    Science laboratories all over the world are entering the public arena and
– as in the Pouilly-Le-Fort farm, where Pasteur publicly prepared his
experiments – are looking for practical solutions capable of taming the
virus. Scientific practice seeks means, compares hypotheses and sets
experiments to find recurrent trends and build more stable knowledge. In
the occasion of the SARS-COV-2, one more element has marked the
communication and representation of the virus: the metaphors that are
escorting its journey. As suggested by Susan Sontag (2001), metaphorical
images are a powerful social construction to relate to adverse events such
as diseases and contagions. The most common and immediate one that has
spread was that of war, of combat, of confrontation in a ring: a metaphor
that invoked the virus as an enemy to fight. Then, slowly – and thanks to
the language of some scientists – we moved from the war metaphor to that
of living together with the virus. This less martial vision was introduced
when we began to familiarize ourselves with the circulation of the virus.
A third image used is that of the adaptation to the host:
Viteritti                                                                                75


                 Of course, more scientific evidence of a mutation is needed but
            it can be said that as the virus tends to adapt to the host. A new virus
            is always very aggressive in the early stages, then it learns to live with
            the host. This is an opportunistic attitude which allows it to survive7.

Coexistence, dance, adaptation: this is the new perimeter of relations to
dwell with. Verbal and material domestication practices embedded within
sociomaterial networks of containment make our relationships with the
virus more visible, less dangerous and more liveable. The American
materialist philosopher Timothy Morton (2013) has coined the concept of
hyperobject for interpreting entities of large spatial and temporal
dimensions that produce effects on the local and global level: the pandemic
looks like this.


3. Science and politics
    In these times, the apparently unbridgeable gap that has often
separated science and politics (at least at the public level) seems to
disappear. We are witnessing three processes: science and politics talk to
each other and share common tables publicly; many scientific knowledges
are put into action in a polyphony of expert voices that enter the public
space; pathogenic agents and material objects become central actors of
political attention.
    Contrary to what Robert Merton said, the immunity of science is deeply
questioned: politics and science join their forces and hybridize their spaces,
while research laboratories move their field of action and communication
in the public arena. Hospitals, research centers, experts, scientists,
politicians, patients are in a common arena and look for common
embankments, they imagine solutions and forecast scenarios. Science and
politics sit side by side in ministerial teams, on television talk shows, in
regional political arenas, and we see a profound redefinition of the role of
scientific and political activity. Scientists find themselves acting as public
actors and policy agents for the sole fact that they speak publicly about
measures, numbers, comparisons, data. Technical objects of daily use
(masks, gowns, gloves, reagents) become central in everyone's life, and new
sociomaterial alliances are established for building stable networks capable
of facing the emergency.
    Politics asks for ready-made, reassuring, univocal answers, but science
and scientists, all over the world, bring partial, in the making, not
reassuring, and unstable results. Experts speak in public about ongoing
experiments, present slides of infected cells in television programs, show
trends and provide partial interpretations and analyses of the current (and
future) situation.
76                                                            Tecnoscienza – 11 (1)

    Politics asks science for answers and science presents itself with open
questions. In this tension, politics and science appear more vulnerable, and
in need of a new relationship, as for the task forces of experts and scientists
created in various Countries testify. Many alliances (and task forces) are
acting internationally, nationally, and regionally. They bring together
scientists and experts from different technical and political fields, an
unprecedented and important collaboration. Science and scientists
(virologists, epidemiologists, clinicians, and so on), have been "gathered"
for an event that affects all latitudes. The composition of the task forces –
often shamelessly populated mainly or only by men – highlights the
separation of expert knowledge between natural and social life. This
separation uncovers the difficulty in framing the entanglement of the
effects brought by the virus and which say: the natural sphere cannot be
separated from the social one!
    Another relevant associative process is the one impressed on the
relationship between research laboratories and clinics. Research must now
be translated into drugs, therapies, vaccine studies, and clinical trials of all
kinds have already started throughout the world. This is an accelerating
movement that has already been in place for decades: after the Human
Genome Project, translational research has aimed to speed up the
discovery of new treatments and diagnostic tools to transfer scientific
knowledge from bench to bedside (Cambrosio et. al. 2006; Neresini and
Viteritti 2014). Serological tests, new drugs and vaccines go in this
direction. The question that arises is how to build common platforms
between scientists from different countries and disciplinary fields to favor
the analysis of large and complex databases, as well as how to ensure the
interoperability between large data systems.
    For the moment being, the alliances-in-the-making between science
and politics translate in new public and private practices: diagnostic
practices such as swabs and serological tests, practices of physical
distancing assisted by the use of protective objects; the safe arrangement of
public spaces (commercial, institutional and mundane); practices of
tracking (via apps and information systems) and of personal hygiene (such
as wash your hands often). Each of these practices, outline necessary as
problematic alliances and associations between humans and non-humans,
as well as between politics and science.


4. Final thoughts
   Although it is not a novelty for STS, scientists from various fields have
recently pointed to the centrality of interdisciplinary research as the only
horizon for understanding the complexity of the living in all its natural-
social-cultural-material-technological forms8. STS as a plural and non-
anthropocentric scientific field, in dialogue with other bodies of
Viteritti                                                                     77

knowledges and experiences (such as technoscientific feminism), can then
contribute in describing connections that would be invisible to a
monocular knowledge perspective. With the pandemic we have witnessed
the impact of the butterfly effect, and, as researchers, we are required to
develop more skills in reading effects that are not given, not linear and not
sequential. We are learning practically the consequences of taking seriously
the idea that we are immersed in a reality where, as humans, we are not
protagonists and architects, but the result of processes of intra-action
(Barad 2007).
   As individuals, we strongly contribute to troubling local and global
ecosystems by creating harmful chains that favor the triggering of "viral"
phenomena, which quickly move across time and space. As Donna
Haraway (2016) suggests, we must equip ourselves theoretically, culturally,
and materially to live an infected planet, seeking non-anthropocentric
adaptations and alternative visions centred on the coexistence of humans
and non-humans.


References
Barad, K. (2007) Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the
   entanglement of matter and meaning, London, Duke University Press.
Cambrosio, A., Keating, P., Mercier, S., Lewison, G., and Mogoutov, A. (2006)
   Mapping the emergence and development of translational cancer research, in
   “European journal of cancer”, 42 (18), pp. 3140-3148.
Capua, I. (2020) Il dopo. Il virus che ci ha costretto a cambiare mappa mentale,
   Milano, Mondadori.
Elliott, A., and Urry, J. (2010) Mobile lives, London, Routledge.
Haraway, D.J. (2016) Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene,
   London, Duke University Press.
Latour, B. (1993) The pasteurization of France, Harvard University Press.
Neresini, F., and Viteritti, A. (2014) From bench to bed, back and beyond: The
   four Bs of biomedical research, in “Tecnoscienza: Italian Journal of Science &
   Technology Studies”, 5 (1), pp. 5-10.
Morton, T. (2013) Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the
  World, University of Minnesota Press.
Quammen, D. (2012) Spillover: animal infections and the next human pandemic,
   New York, WW Norton & Company.
Sontag, S. (2001) Illness as metaphor and AIDS and its metaphors, London,
   Macmillan.
78                                                                 Tecnoscienza – 11 (1)


    1
      An extended and more academically attuned version of this contribution was
recently published in “Sociologia Italiana”, 2020/16, pp. 237-255.
    2
      Photos circulated in April 2020, made by photojournalist Sam Yeh.
    3
      The figure shows the image of a frame exported from a video available here:
https://www.adnkronos.com/salute/2020/05/27/nuovo-coronavirus-sta-diventan-
do-piu-buono-risposta-che-divide-medici-scienziati_mUy2usyMuJWarqznQbEL-
4H.html.
    4
       Le Monde, March 25, 2020 https://www.lemonde.fr/signataires/bruno-
latour/.
    5
      Video-interview "How to survive on an infected planet". Turin Book Festival
"SALTO Extra" on May 15, 2020 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-
CaRdmalZHok
    6
      Ilaria Capua talked about one of the first viruses that passed from animals to
man with the birth of breeding and agriculture: measles. It still lives with us causing
contagion and death. In 2015 alone, the World Health Organization estimated
134,200 deaths caused by measles, which in its debut "walked with the feet of
humans" and took a long time to spread (as did HIV and other viruses).
    7
       Massimo Clemente, Virologist at the San Raffaele Hospital in Milan,
expressed this opinion in a interview.
    8
      Two examples of scholars who underline the urgency of an interdisciplinary
approach. The first one is scientist Ilaria Capua, who, in her texts and in the public
discussions during the quarantine, invites sciences (from physics to information
technology) to join forces and knowledges to look at the complexity of the health
of the living beings and the planet. The second example is represented by Deborah
Lupton, who has been involved for years in studies on digitization processes that
also affect public health. On March 29th, 2020 she launched a working group
entitled Social Research for a Covid and Post-Covid World: An Initial Agenda,
which contains topics that can only be addressed through the integration of
different disciplines.
