<aside> ⚡ In this project, our key task is to explore the interplay between the biology of infection and transmission and the social and environmental systems that shape exposure to and treatment of infectious diseases.

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Contents

Pathogen Group Assignments

❓Why am I asking you to do this?

The overarching goals of this class are focused on using historical examples to help you develop a systems-level perspective on infectious disease transmission. Doing this is a kind of juggling act that requires you to understand how the social, biological and environmental features of infection overlap and interact.

<aside> 💡 Reading about and discussing historical epidemics can take us partway to these goals. But to really get a sense of how these systems work, there is no substitute for taking on your own exploration.

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Over the course of the term, we will build to a culminating assignment which can take on whatever form interests you and is appropriate to your goals for the project. This could be an academic paper, a podcast episode, a blog post, a policy whitepaper, or basically anything else. The final form of the project should emerge from your work on the topic over the course of the term, so no need to commit from the first day!

Motivating Ideas

Throughout the term, we will lean heavily on the framework developed by the medical historian Charles Rosenberg, who made an important distinction between configuration and contamination as modes of explanation for infectious disease outcomes.

<aside> 🦠 The contamination perspective is focused on the role of specific agents or contaminants: M. Tuberculosis as the cause of Tuberculosis disease, SARS-CoV-2 as the cause of COVID-19, HIV as the cause of AIDS, and so on.

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<aside> 🧩 Configuration refers to a systems-level understanding of infection as the product of interacting social, biological, and environmental components.

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Rosenberg points out that these perspectives are not in conflict with each other: They have long lived in intellectual harmony even if they sometimes differ in the logical conclusions they imply. The contamination perspective nests within a configuration-based view of the world: Where a configuration-based view focuses on the way social structures (e.g. neighborhoods, racism, etc) and environmental sources, e.g. water systems, facilitate the movement of pathogens from one host to another, the contamination-based view is concerned with what happens within the host and at the boundary between hosts.

Why a group project?

There are two main reasons I encourage students to work in groups on this project:

  1. I am hoping you will try to do something ambitious for your final project that might be hard to do alone, particularly in the short span of a semester. By working in a group, it is more likely that you can produce something that takes more overall labor distributed across members of the group and that capitalizes on group members’ different interests and skills.
  2. Having a smaller number of projects makes it easier for me and the rest of the class to give detailed feedback. The amount of time (and mental energy) I can spend on each paper is necessarily limited, try as I might to find more of both hiding somewhere! Having fewer overall assignments to read and give feedback on allows me the ability to give a deeper reading and more detailed feedback on your work as it develops.

With this said, I recognize that not everyone will be excited about working in a larger group, or that you may want to pursue a question of interest specific to just yourself or perhaps one other classmate. Because of that, I am happy to discuss the possibility of individual or smaller-group projects to make sure everyone has the best possible experience and one that is tailored to your learning needs.

Final Product

The final product of your project should be aimed at making a contribution towards efforts to do something about real problems associated with the pathogen your group is focusing on. This impact could be increasing knowledge and awareness among the public, lobbying a public health agency, governmental or non-governmental body to change a particular policy, or something else.

Because of this emphasis on real-world problems, the format of the final project is flexible and reflects the diverse ways in which these goals can be achieved. Examples of what this could look like include - but are not limited to - the following: