Nightingale, Dan; (2025) Information, Immunity and Incredulity: An ethnographic study of HPV and COVID vaccine information practices in Dublin, Ireland. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

This thesis explores the relationship between vaccines, information and marginality in Dublin, Ireland. At its core, I ask why it is that many conversations about vaccines can be so difficult to hold or mobilise such strong sentiments. In particular, conversations about vaccine damage occur at the intersection of multiple, conflicting understandings of bodily events which ‘ricochet up’ through wider society with devastating effects (Parkhurst et al. 2017). As such, I do not position this work as an ethnography of ‘vaccine hesitancy’ (McDonald et al. 2015) amongst a particular group but use it as an emic concept that actively constructs and reconfigures social relations that form around vaccines. Central to this are questions of information; whose understandings and experiences of vaccination and the world are deemed important or admissible? At what points are specific ideas rejected, challenged or marginalised, and with what consequences for who? And how do tacit understandings of information, facts, data and their affordances shape the conversions within which they actively participate as opposed to merely represent? By explicitly situating vaccines within the socio-material milieu as actors in their own right, I ethnographically trace their entanglements with different dimensions of life in Ireland such their relationships with scientific expertise, questions of gender, bodily norms and individual autonomy; the power of facts and the existence of putative alternatives; and the question of how failure is materialised when things go wrong through vaccine injury or a drop in public trust. I ultimately argue that a focus on vaccine “refusal” or “hesitancy” can at times produce the very forms of resistance that it seeks to overcome. Through 5 attending to the wider social dynamics that vaccines participate inI aim to explore different, less confrontational framings of conversations in public health, whilst also showing how anthropology is especially well-suited to engage with urgent contemporary conversations.

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