Visualizing Uncertainty and Vulnerability

Abstract

This article considers how scientific visualizations of data represent attempts to record and predict certainty about our social, political, and economic experiences and futures. Written from the perspective of someone living in the UK’s lockdown response to the global Coronavirus pandemic, the article reflects on questions of uncertainty and vulnerability which are constructed in the Government’s response and experienced by the UK’s population. It discusses graphs which scientists have produced to model the impact of the disease on the population, together with an artist’s documentation of the data which his body produced during cancer treatment, and the philosophical notion of ‘living with dying,’ which the feminist philosopher Gillian Howie developed as a way to affirm vulnerability in life.