Making Better Numbers through Bioethnographic Collaboration

Abstract

In this article, I describe my ongoing bioethnographic collaboration with a multidisciplinary team of exposure scientists in environmental engineering and health. First, I explain how and why integrating ethnography and number-based disciplines is such a complex, time-consuming, and worthwhile process, when ethnography produces a kind of excessive “big data” that is not easily enumerated. Then I describe three of our current bioethnographic projects that seek to make better numbers about how (1) neighborhoods, (2) water distribution, and (3) employment and chemical exposures shape bodily processes in a highly unequal world. To conclude, I reflect on how we might harness ethnographic excess for making better numbers and thus better knowledge, and also how bioethnographic collaboration inevitably transforms ethnography even as we insist on its excess. [collaboration, methodology, ethnography, big data, biomedical science].