Time, place, person: Field epidemiology as a political practice

Abstract Five years after the end of the Ebola epidemic, a district in Sierra Leone received a measles alert. This article tells the story of the epidemic that followed and the response that was mounted in the context of the new global epidemic preparedness and biosecurity paradigms that govern the management of health emergencies. Focusing on the daily encounters that constitute outbreak investigations and the narratives, negotiations and contestations that emerge from these interactions, allows us to envision field epidemiology as a political practice. This means seeing how global epidemiological logics converge with local politics and forms of exclusion. Efforts to make epidemics knowable and responding to them, then, reshape political relations, governing citizens and ordering relations between levels of public health governance. At the same time, as field epidemiological work becomes entangled in local political negotiations, it also generates new spaces for contestation, resistance and repair.