Futuring a world without disease: visualising the elimination of hepatitis C

ABSTRACT

Informed by work on futurity in science and technology studies, we trace how global disease elimination targets perform a world without disease through their translations in visual advocacy campaigns. Treating disease elimination targets and their visualisations as performative, we take the case of hepatitis C elimination to interrogate how futuring practices in public health govern the present and make effects. We focus specifically on how World Health Organization targets in the Global Health Sector Strategy on Viral Hepatitis entangle with visual resources produced by the World Hepatitis Alliance NOhep advocacy campaign. Targets and their visual representations in campaigns perform a disease elimination future which is set apart from the present, and yet urges action in-the-now. It enacts global health citizens but separates them from localised experiences of living with, and being cured of, disease. This disease elimination future relies heavily on instrumental rationalities and logics of the present, including the privileging of biomedical technoscientific knowledge, implementation science and global health governance, to the exclusion of other matters of concern, flattening out complexity to perform its certain achievability. These enactments raise political questions about how disease elimination futures might be made in a different mode.

KEYWORDS:

• Hepatitis C
• targets
• futures
• disease elimination
• visual representation
• performativity

Acknowledgements

We are grateful for support from the University of New South Wales SHARP (Professor Tim Rhodes) and Scientia Fellowship (Dr Kari Lancaster) schemes. We also acknowledge support from the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Health Protection Research Unit in Blood Borne and Sexually Transmitted Infections at University College London in partnership with Public Health England (PHE) in collaboration with London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. The views expressed in this publication are those of the author(s) and not necessarily those of the NIHR, the Department of Health and Social Care or Public Health England.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).