Abstract
The Covid-19 pandemic cast renewed global attention to understanding disease spread and
public health research methodologies. This thesis seeks to contribute to this understanding by addressing key questions concerning knowledge production and dissemination in the context of Covid-19. My research is an ethnography of the reconfiguration of epidemic knowledge production in the National Institute for Communicable Diseases (NICD), responsible for monitoring and guiding public health and political responses to Covid-19. During Covid-19,
the NICD transformed its labour practices highlighting theoretical notions of dramaturgy whereby epidemic data continually moved between front and back stages of epidemic research. Furthermore, epidemic data was only deemed usable once cleaned further modernising
classical anthropological work around purification. These transformations are manifested by the digitisation of labour, the datafication of epidemic spread, and the communication of risk. Drawing on interviews and participant observation in the Outbreak Response Unit at the NICD I trace the practice of scientific work. By immersing myself in this space, I gained a deep understanding of not only how Covid-19 research has changed through the use of digital software, databases and algorithms but also the way knowledge about the epidemic was produced. The co-ordinated response to Covid-19 was much more complex than revealed to the public. With insider knowledge of the interactions and standard operating procedures within the NICD, I show how Covid-19 and ultimately, epidemic response was reconfigured.