Digital Disease Ecologies: Encounter, Datafication and the Digital Geographies of One Health

ABSTRACT This paper examines intersecting digital, disease and more‐than‐human geographies to generate an analytical frame for interrogating how digital technologies configure disease emergence and multispecies health. The proliferation of digital tools in public health has spurred the development of ‘digital health’, a term encompassing the technologies that utilise digital media to manage illness and support well‐being. Meanwhile, the rise of the One Health public health paradigm—and with it the idea that non‐humans, humans and the environment form an interdependent system whose governance should be coordinated to secure positive health outcomes for all—has contributed to new technologies that monitor and manage health across species lines. Despite this ambition, much social scientific analysis has argued that digital health interventions are anthropocentric, only attending to non‐humans insofar as they represent a risk to human health, with less consideration of how digital health technologies can cultivate understanding of and responsiveness to how pathogens, disease vectors, reservoirs and environments in specific contexts are implicated in and impacted by disease emergence. Through the case of Snake Awareness Rescue and Protection App (SARPA), a digital snake translocation and snakebite prevention mobile application in Kerala, India, this paper extends recent geographical ‘digital ecologies’ scholarship's concern for the digitisation of more‐than‐human worlds to digital health technology and disease control. To do this, it proposes the lens of ‘digital disease ecologies’: a way for geographers to analyse how diverse processes of digital encounter and datafication generate situated modes of understanding and acting upon disease. In so doing, it extends digital geographies’ engagement with the more‐than‐human to consider how digitisation is consequential for multispecies health; contributes to health geography efforts to conceptualise how disease ecologies are shaped by the affordances of digital technology; and furthers geographical discussions of convivial human‐non‐human relations to question how digital technologies may facilitate coexistence.