Overview for doctoral colloquium

The central research question for my dissertation is, how does outbreak surveillance operate as a governance mechanism for foodborne disease, a highly distributed, farm-to-fork public health problem? I answer this question through a historical and ethnographic study of outbreak surveillance as a sociotechnical system. I argue that it operates as a special type of sociotechnical system, an interstitial sociotechnical system, nestled between and knitting together systems of clinical care, the food chain, and regulation. To promote coordination across a large network of diverse stakeholders, public health workers use a heterogeneous mix of laboratory, database, epidemiological, and communications technologies.