Introduction

This introductory chapter historicises the field of epidemiology within an interdisciplinary historiography and critically reviews its association with mechanical objectivity to demonstrate how this book's focus on obfuscation can make the socio-political context of epidemiology visible. This vulnerability results in epidemiological obfuscation, the phenomenon that this book introduces and elucidates through a series of empirical case studies. In this introduction, the editors show how these multidisciplinary studies exemplify epidemiological obfuscation in three main ways: through the use or misuse of specific reference populations, through the impact of key materials or environments, and through the intentional or accidental creation of invisibility. Invisibility is discussed as a critical component of epidemiological obfuscation, an invisibility that is inflicted by formal epidemiological structures and the practices of the expansive epistemic community that comprises epidemiology. Epidemiological obfuscation is introduced as a problem or epistemic injustice and the editors conclude by calling for epistemically just epidemiological practices.