Abstract
The past year has shown that even the fundamental idea of ‘evidence’ – in health contexts, but also more broadly - is coming under increasing strain. This open letter argues that the current crises of evidence and knowledge in which we find ourselves demands new speculative methodologies. It introduces the Index of Evidence – a Beacon Project funded by Exeter University’s Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health - as one example of such a methodology, outlining its theoretical foundations and process. The key innovation of this project is to rethink the form and presentation that research can take. Using the conceptual and material affordances of the index, it merges the creative and critical in ways that aim to make an important contribution to more inter-connected, theoretically sophisticated thinking around evidence.
Highlights
The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has presented itself as an epistemological as well as an epidemiological crisis, demonstrating just how fraught and contested questions of evidence have become[1]
What are the processes through which raw data is translated into usable evidence, into epidemiological models, or narrative shape? And if disciplines and fields of knowledge construct and mobilise evidence differently, how do we negotiate between these sometimes incommensurate forms? What of the relationship between scientific expertise, clinical or practice-based insights, and the first-hand experience of patients? Who decides what kinds of evidence counts? How can evidence be effectively mobilised in our current, post-truth context, while still acknowledging its limitations or incompleteness?
Understanding how these challenges are being felt in health contexts should be a priority for the medical humanities and social sciences, but they are by definition complex, broad-based phenomena, scattered across multiple cultural locations and diagnosed under a shifting set of terms: the ‘post-factual’4, ‘the misinformation society’5, ‘fake news’6, ‘information disorder’[7] and that most widespread neologism, ‘post-truth’[8]
Summary
Any reports and responses or comments on the article can be found at the end of the article. Author roles: Partington G: Conceptualization, Investigation, Methodology, Project Administration, Writing – Original Draft Preparation; Salisbury L: Conceptualization, Funding Acquisition, Investigation, Methodology, Project Administration, Writing – Review & Editing; Hinchliffe S: Conceptualization, Funding Acquisition, Investigation, Methodology, Project Administration, Writing – Review & Editing; Michael M: Conceptualization, Funding Acquisition, Investigation, Methodology, Project Administration, Writing – Review & Editing; Choksey L: Conceptualization, Investigation, Methodology, Project Administration, Writing – Review & Editing.
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