Marco Dell’Oca

MARCO DELL’OCA, then a graduate student at University of California, Davis, California, was awarded funding in April 2022 to aid research on “Immunization Controversies: Vaccine hesitant knowledge ecologies after COVID-19,” supervised by Dr. Marisol de la Cadena. The dissertation resulting from this research is an ethnography of vaccine controversies across the US, Italy, the UK, and Germany. In particular, this research probes how a diverse array of people who question or reject vaccine-based immunology fashion idiosyncratic relations with each other, with bio-medical knowledge, and with public health authorities. By zooming in on how a shared concern about vaccines connects in continuous conversations different people from different places, both online and offline, vaccine hesitant experiences emerge as a heterogeneous intellectual efflorescence, with novel political stakes that only loosely map onto the usual ideological or partisan divides. Combining media analysis of digital content (like Telegram messaging groups and Twitter posts), forms of public address (protest slogans, songs, stickers, graffiti), and extended, years-long in-person fieldwork dialogues with vaccine hesitant thinkers between Western Europe and the United States, this research recovers aspects of vaccine hesitant epistemologies that surface as traces of the current disjuncture between biomedical expertise and segments of society, but also as openings to different ways of living that relation. In particular, it suggests that the prevalence of vaccine doubts does not necessarily involve a wholesale dismissal of biomedicine as a field of expertise. Rather, it often entails a more questioning attitude towards the knowledge economy of biomedical research, that sometimes reveals disengagement from it, but just as much also expresses a controversial demand for a different imagination of its knowledge practices.