K Tawny Paul
Biographic Data
| ID | 1074516 |
|---|---|
| NAME | K Tawny Paul |
| GIVEN NAMES | K Tawny |
| FAMILY NAME | Paul |
| SIGNATURE | PAUL K T |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Vienna |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3851-8951 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 29 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 60 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 29 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2009 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Governance in action
Pediatric vaccination consultations are central to how childhood vaccination is organized and sustained in practice, particularly in contexts where vaccination is voluntary, delivery is physician-led, and formal provider oversight is limited. Drawing on street-level bureaucracy literature and a biopolitical perspective on health governance, we conceptualize pediatric vaccination consultations as sites of governance-in-action and explore how pedia…
Uncertainty, (de)valuation, and the limits of legal calculability
Vaccinations are considered one of the most impactful and cost-effective forms of public health interventions but governing them presents distinct challenges. In vaccination campaigns, a balance must be struck between individual freedom and collective safety, and between vaccines’ public health impact and the viability of vaccine manufacturing business. The rare but occasionally severe adverse effects of vaccinations can unsettle this balance. Th…
Making vaccines investable in preclinical vaccine R&D
Recent analyses of vaccine R&D focus on the problem of vaccine access and equity and link them to assetization logics in the pharmaceutical industry. At the same time, empirical analyses of valuation practices in health and biomedicine point to the multiplicity of coexisting valuations. This paper investigates how this multiplicity articulates with the pharmaceutical industry’s imperative to capitalize upon early-stage vaccine research, shaping w…
“That’s a tricky question”
Vaccination mandates can help improve vaccine uptake but remain controversial. • In Austria, parents and paediatricians favour incentives over mandates. • Perceptions are informed by individual experiences in healthcare systems. • Participants consider mandates in terms of ethical and epidemiological justification. • Societal effects of mandates are weighed against their potential to increase uptake. The COVID-19 pandemic and recurrent outbreaks …
Why ‘inclusive policymaking’ is needed during crises
During the COVID-19 pandemic, calls for unity from politicians and public health experts contrasted sharply with the rising social divisions between vaccinated and unvaccinated people. Through 127 in-depth qualitative interviews conducted at two time points (October 2020 [n = 72], October 2021 [n = 55]) in Austria, a country with high vaccine hesitancy, this paper explores how and why deepening social divisions around vaccination occurred. Our fi…
‘My baby does not even drink water yet’
The notion of risk is decisive in childhood vaccination campaigns, yet parental and paediatricians’ understandings of risk are not necessarily congruent with formalised risk assessments. Likewise, formalised risk assessments tell us little about the (risk) work that policies entail for their target groups. We draw on the concept of risk work to examine how parents of infants and paediatricians negotiate vaccine-related risks in paediatric consult…
Towards a new policy analytical methodology in the study of vaccination governance
In the face of declining vaccine uptake, public health advocates and decision makers have emphasised the value of vaccination, expressing it in medical and technical terms and metrics, such as in the number of lives saved. This narrow and monolithic understanding of value conceals how different actors value and assess the importance of vaccination – for example, its scientific, economic, ethical, social or personal value. To capture the scientifi…
From jurisdiction to veridiction
Economic valuations play an increasingly important role in contemporary vaccination governance. Focusing on the United States, this paper presents a genealogy of economization in immunization policy. Borrowing from Foucault, it argues that economization occurs in two distinct modalities: juridical and veridical. In the former case, economization serves the purpose of 'doing justice' to an issue or practice. In the latter case, it asks what must b…
“I can't see the forest for the ticks, uhm, trees …”
When it comes to health-related information-seeking behavior, online communities play a key role for some groups, such as parents. With a case study of online communities in a loosely organized vaccination system, that of Austria, we study how parents make use of a prominent online forum (parents.at) in their vaccination trajectories and situate this analysis in its socio-political context. Based on inductive qualitative analysis of relevant thre…
Citizenship in times of crisis
Drawing upon 152 in-depth qualitative interviews with residents in Austria carried out in the first year of the pandemic, this article discusses how people’s experiences with COVID-19 policies reflect and reshape state–citizen relations. Coinciding with a significant government crisis, the first year of COVID-19 in Austria saw pandemic measures justified with reference to a biological, often medical understanding of health that framed disease pre…
Tracing data flows in Norway and Austria
The increased importance of datafication in different domains of society, and health in particular, has generated much attention in STS, specifically in the Nordic context. While much of this literature tackles newly emerging forms of data governance, we focus on a historically established and mundane data practice: that of recording vaccinations in vaccine registries. We mobilise the concept of data flows to compare the link between registry pra…
Anticipating hopes, fears and expectations towards Covid-19 vaccines
Vaccine uptake is essential to managing the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, and vaccine hesitancy is a persistent concern. At the same time, both decision-makers and the general population have high hopes for COVID-19 vaccination. Drawing from qualitative interview data collected in October 2020 as part of the pan-European SolPan study, this study explores early and anticipatory expectations, hopes and fears regarding COVID-19 vaccination across seven…
Democratic research
The sudden and dramatic advent of the COVID-19 pandemic led to urgent demands for timely, relevant, yet rigorous research. This paper discusses the origin, design, and execution of the SolPan research commons, a large-scale, international, comparative, qualitative research project that sought to respond to the need for knowledge among researchers and policymakers in times of crisis. The form of organization as a research commons is characterized …
Understanding compliance as multi-faceted
In some countries, far-reaching ‘lockdown’ measures to contain the spread of coronavirus were implemented early in 2020. In Austria, these early measures were met with a high degree of compliance among the country’s population. In this paper, we draw upon qualitative interviews, and ask how people made sense of the restrictions imposed during the first lockdown in April 2020 and what shaped their compliance. Empirical research has so far tried to…
Covid-19 vaccine hesitancy and gender
Institutionalised ignorance in policy and regulation
Unpacking the Role of Metrics in Global Vaccination Governance
Recent efforts by intergovernmental actors, such as the World Health Organization (WHO), to foster collaboration on vaccine-preventable diseases stand in stark contrast to the contextually contingent nature of national immunization programs: vaccination schedules and delivery differ greatly, and so do the ways in which these programs are assessed by means of coverage rates-a key metric in global health governance. These divergences, we show, are …
Policy-Relevant Attitudes Toward Covid-19 Vaccination
Background: Vaccination is considered to be a key public health intervention to end the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet, the success of the intervention is contingent on attitudes toward vaccination and the design of vaccination policies. Methods: We conduct cross-sectional analyses of policy-relevant attitudes toward COVID-19 vaccination using survey data of a representative sample of Austrian residents collected by the Austrian Corona Panel Project (ACP…
Beyond the “information deficit model” - understanding vaccine-hesitant attitudes of midwives in Austria
Research shows that, for parents, vaccine decision-making builds on trust and dialogue with healthcare professionals and is more than a technical issue. In order to foster these interactions, understanding healthcare professionals' means of engaging with information is key to understanding how they engage with their constituents. Healthcare workers are more than neutral resources; their daily praxis influenced by their professional standing in th…
Walking the (argumentative) talk using citizen science
Background: Vaccination policy has grown increasingly polarised, and concerns about vaccination practices are often articulated jointly with fears over declining trust in scientific expertise and the demise of evidence-based policy. This has led to a discursive deadlock in which evidence comes to denote something that is crafted and monopolised by a trained élite, with no role to play for the workings of democracy. Our own methodologies tend to a…
Beyond evidence versus truthiness
Current political developments in established liberal democracies in both Europe and North America have fundamentally called into question the normative relations between truth, knowledge and politics. Whether labeled "posttruth" or truthiness, commentators lament the willful spread and deployment of nonknowledge and ignorance as important political forces. In this paper, we discuss ignorance in its strategic dimension by weaving together insight…
Accounting for Men's Work
This article addresses the social, cultural and gendered meanings of men’s work in early modern Britain. As has long been accepted for women, men’s work should be seen as multiple rather than single-occupational focused. Drawing on the diaries of three middle-rank tradesmen from the eighteenth century, the article considers the different forms that work took, and how words denoting labour such as ‘employment’, ‘work’ and ‘business’ were actually …
Putting public health infrastructures to the test
This article presents two cases of policymaking concerning the vaccine against Human Papilloma Virus (HPV), which is sexually transmitted and carcinogenic. Our analysis focuses on its introduction in Austria and the Netherlands. In both contexts, we find prevention and screening to be at once complementary and competing public health logics and we draw on the concept of 'infrastructure' to understand their roles in shaping the reception of the va…
Saving lives
Vaccination against the sexually transmitted Human Papilloma Virus (HPV), a necessary agent for the development of cervical cancer, has triggered much debate. In Austria, HPV policy turned from "lagging behind" in 2008 into "Europe's frontrunner" by 2013. Drawing on qualitative research, the article shows how the vaccine was transformed and made "good enough" over the course of five years. By means of tinkering and shifting storylines, policy off…
Organ donation as transition work
An increasing number of patients become eligible for organ transplants. In the Netherlands, at the level of policy discourse, growing waiting lists are often referred to as a persistent "shortage" of organs, producing a "public health crisis." In this way, organ donation is presented as an ethical, social, and medical necessity. Likewise, policy discourse offers a range of seemingly unambiguous solutions: improving logistical infrastructure at th…
Beyond evidence versus truthiness
Current political developments in established liberal democracies in both Europe and North America have fundamentally called into question the normative relations between truth, knowledge and politics. Whether labeled "posttruth" or truthiness, commentators lament the willful spread and deployment of nonknowledge and ignorance as important political forces. In this paper, we discuss ignorance in its strategic dimension by weaving together insight…
Saving lives
Vaccination against the sexually transmitted Human Papilloma Virus (HPV), a necessary agent for the development of cervical cancer, has triggered much debate. In Austria, HPV policy turned from "lagging behind" in 2008 into "Europe's frontrunner" by 2013. Drawing on qualitative research, the article shows how the vaccine was transformed and made "good enough" over the course of five years. By means of tinkering and shifting storylines, policy off…
The Europeanization of food safety
This article explores the evolution of food safety policy at the level of the European Union (EU) from a discourse-analytical perspective. First, the article traces the political saliency of food safety since the food scares of the late 1990s, such as 'mad cow disease', and explores the consequent breakdown of the historically sedimented policy approach. Specifically, I highlight key moments of institutional transformation at the EU level by cons…
Putting public health infrastructures to the test
This article presents two cases of policymaking concerning the vaccine against Human Papilloma Virus (HPV), which is sexually transmitted and carcinogenic. Our analysis focuses on its introduction in Austria and the Netherlands. In both contexts, we find prevention and screening to be at once complementary and competing public health logics and we draw on the concept of 'infrastructure' to understand their roles in shaping the reception of the va…
Discourse analysis
In light of the frequent, yet often divergent, uses of the term ‘discourse analysis’ and the recurrent misunderstandings associated with it, this article seeks to clarify the central postulates of poststructuralist discourse theory and to raise critical methodological issues associated with it. More specifically, this article explores the usefulness of discourse theory for the analysis of policy (discourses) by way of discussing the conceptual re…
Unpacking the Role of Metrics in Global Vaccination Governance
Recent efforts by intergovernmental actors, such as the World Health Organization (WHO), to foster collaboration on vaccine-preventable diseases stand in stark contrast to the contextually contingent nature of national immunization programs: vaccination schedules and delivery differ greatly, and so do the ways in which these programs are assessed by means of coverage rates-a key metric in global health governance. These divergences, we show, are …
Accounting for Men's Work
This article addresses the social, cultural and gendered meanings of men’s work in early modern Britain. As has long been accepted for women, men’s work should be seen as multiple rather than single-occupational focused. Drawing on the diaries of three middle-rank tradesmen from the eighteenth century, the article considers the different forms that work took, and how words denoting labour such as ‘employment’, ‘work’ and ‘business’ were actually …
Institutionalised ignorance in policy and regulation
Dutch Food Safety Policy
Food scares, such as the discovery of ‘mad cow disease’ and incidents of dioxins contamination, have led to political crises across Europe over the past decade, especially in Germany and the United Kingdom. In the Netherlands, by contrast, such discussions have remained relatively narrow and led to only minor changes in framing food safety as a policy issue. This relative stability of Dutch food safety policy rests on particular understandings of…
Covid-19 vaccine hesitancy and gender
Walking the (argumentative) talk using citizen science
Background: Vaccination policy has grown increasingly polarised, and concerns about vaccination practices are often articulated jointly with fears over declining trust in scientific expertise and the demise of evidence-based policy. This has led to a discursive deadlock in which evidence comes to denote something that is crafted and monopolised by a trained élite, with no role to play for the workings of democracy. Our own methodologies tend to a…
Credit, reputation, and masculinity in British urban commerce
This article draws on cases of public insult from the Edinburgh consistory court to explore constructions of credit and reputation during the eighteenth century. Scotland's unique legal context offers new insights into the honour of men and women, replacing the received view that female honour was almost entirely about sexual honour and complicating our understanding of male honour among the middling sort. In contrast to studies that view the cre…
Discourse analysis
In light of the frequent, yet often divergent, uses of the term ‘discourse analysis’ and the recurrent misunderstandings associated with it, this article seeks to clarify the central postulates of poststructuralist discourse theory and to raise critical methodological issues associated with it. More specifically, this article explores the usefulness of discourse theory for the analysis of policy (discourses) by way of discussing the conceptual re…
Dutch Food Safety Policy
Food scares, such as the discovery of ‘mad cow disease’ and incidents of dioxins contamination, have led to political crises across Europe over the past decade, especially in Germany and the United Kingdom. In the Netherlands, by contrast, such discussions have remained relatively narrow and led to only minor changes in framing food safety as a policy issue. This relative stability of Dutch food safety policy rests on particular understandings of…
The Europeanization of food safety
This article explores the evolution of food safety policy at the level of the European Union (EU) from a discourse-analytical perspective. First, the article traces the political saliency of food safety since the food scares of the late 1990s, such as 'mad cow disease', and explores the consequent breakdown of the historically sedimented policy approach. Specifically, I highlight key moments of institutional transformation at the EU level by cons…
Credit, reputation, and masculinity in British urban commerce
This article draws on cases of public insult from the Edinburgh consistory court to explore constructions of credit and reputation during the eighteenth century. Scotland's unique legal context offers new insights into the honour of men and women, replacing the received view that female honour was almost entirely about sexual honour and complicating our understanding of male honour among the middling sort. In contrast to studies that view the cre…
Organ donation as transition work
An increasing number of patients become eligible for organ transplants. In the Netherlands, at the level of policy discourse, growing waiting lists are often referred to as a persistent "shortage" of organs, producing a "public health crisis." In this way, organ donation is presented as an ethical, social, and medical necessity. Likewise, policy discourse offers a range of seemingly unambiguous solutions: improving logistical infrastructure at th…
Saving lives
Vaccination against the sexually transmitted Human Papilloma Virus (HPV), a necessary agent for the development of cervical cancer, has triggered much debate. In Austria, HPV policy turned from "lagging behind" in 2008 into "Europe's frontrunner" by 2013. Drawing on qualitative research, the article shows how the vaccine was transformed and made "good enough" over the course of five years. By means of tinkering and shifting storylines, policy off…
Accounting for Men's Work
This article addresses the social, cultural and gendered meanings of men’s work in early modern Britain. As has long been accepted for women, men’s work should be seen as multiple rather than single-occupational focused. Drawing on the diaries of three middle-rank tradesmen from the eighteenth century, the article considers the different forms that work took, and how words denoting labour such as ‘employment’, ‘work’ and ‘business’ were actually …
Putting public health infrastructures to the test
This article presents two cases of policymaking concerning the vaccine against Human Papilloma Virus (HPV), which is sexually transmitted and carcinogenic. Our analysis focuses on its introduction in Austria and the Netherlands. In both contexts, we find prevention and screening to be at once complementary and competing public health logics and we draw on the concept of 'infrastructure' to understand their roles in shaping the reception of the va…
Beyond evidence versus truthiness
Current political developments in established liberal democracies in both Europe and North America have fundamentally called into question the normative relations between truth, knowledge and politics. Whether labeled "posttruth" or truthiness, commentators lament the willful spread and deployment of nonknowledge and ignorance as important political forces. In this paper, we discuss ignorance in its strategic dimension by weaving together insight…
Walking the (argumentative) talk using citizen science
Background: Vaccination policy has grown increasingly polarised, and concerns about vaccination practices are often articulated jointly with fears over declining trust in scientific expertise and the demise of evidence-based policy. This has led to a discursive deadlock in which evidence comes to denote something that is crafted and monopolised by a trained élite, with no role to play for the workings of democracy. Our own methodologies tend to a…
Policy-Relevant Attitudes Toward Covid-19 Vaccination
Background: Vaccination is considered to be a key public health intervention to end the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet, the success of the intervention is contingent on attitudes toward vaccination and the design of vaccination policies. Methods: We conduct cross-sectional analyses of policy-relevant attitudes toward COVID-19 vaccination using survey data of a representative sample of Austrian residents collected by the Austrian Corona Panel Project (ACP…
Beyond the “information deficit model” - understanding vaccine-hesitant attitudes of midwives in Austria
Research shows that, for parents, vaccine decision-making builds on trust and dialogue with healthcare professionals and is more than a technical issue. In order to foster these interactions, understanding healthcare professionals' means of engaging with information is key to understanding how they engage with their constituents. Healthcare workers are more than neutral resources; their daily praxis influenced by their professional standing in th…
Anticipating hopes, fears and expectations towards Covid-19 vaccines
Vaccine uptake is essential to managing the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, and vaccine hesitancy is a persistent concern. At the same time, both decision-makers and the general population have high hopes for COVID-19 vaccination. Drawing from qualitative interview data collected in October 2020 as part of the pan-European SolPan study, this study explores early and anticipatory expectations, hopes and fears regarding COVID-19 vaccination across seven…
Democratic research
The sudden and dramatic advent of the COVID-19 pandemic led to urgent demands for timely, relevant, yet rigorous research. This paper discusses the origin, design, and execution of the SolPan research commons, a large-scale, international, comparative, qualitative research project that sought to respond to the need for knowledge among researchers and policymakers in times of crisis. The form of organization as a research commons is characterized …
Understanding compliance as multi-faceted
In some countries, far-reaching ‘lockdown’ measures to contain the spread of coronavirus were implemented early in 2020. In Austria, these early measures were met with a high degree of compliance among the country’s population. In this paper, we draw upon qualitative interviews, and ask how people made sense of the restrictions imposed during the first lockdown in April 2020 and what shaped their compliance. Empirical research has so far tried to…
Covid-19 vaccine hesitancy and gender
Institutionalised ignorance in policy and regulation
Unpacking the Role of Metrics in Global Vaccination Governance
Recent efforts by intergovernmental actors, such as the World Health Organization (WHO), to foster collaboration on vaccine-preventable diseases stand in stark contrast to the contextually contingent nature of national immunization programs: vaccination schedules and delivery differ greatly, and so do the ways in which these programs are assessed by means of coverage rates-a key metric in global health governance. These divergences, we show, are …
Tracing data flows in Norway and Austria
The increased importance of datafication in different domains of society, and health in particular, has generated much attention in STS, specifically in the Nordic context. While much of this literature tackles newly emerging forms of data governance, we focus on a historically established and mundane data practice: that of recording vaccinations in vaccine registries. We mobilise the concept of data flows to compare the link between registry pra…
“I can't see the forest for the ticks, uhm, trees …”
When it comes to health-related information-seeking behavior, online communities play a key role for some groups, such as parents. With a case study of online communities in a loosely organized vaccination system, that of Austria, we study how parents make use of a prominent online forum (parents.at) in their vaccination trajectories and situate this analysis in its socio-political context. Based on inductive qualitative analysis of relevant thre…
Citizenship in times of crisis
Drawing upon 152 in-depth qualitative interviews with residents in Austria carried out in the first year of the pandemic, this article discusses how people’s experiences with COVID-19 policies reflect and reshape state–citizen relations. Coinciding with a significant government crisis, the first year of COVID-19 in Austria saw pandemic measures justified with reference to a biological, often medical understanding of health that framed disease pre…
“That’s a tricky question”
Vaccination mandates can help improve vaccine uptake but remain controversial. • In Austria, parents and paediatricians favour incentives over mandates. • Perceptions are informed by individual experiences in healthcare systems. • Participants consider mandates in terms of ethical and epidemiological justification. • Societal effects of mandates are weighed against their potential to increase uptake. The COVID-19 pandemic and recurrent outbreaks …
Why ‘inclusive policymaking’ is needed during crises
During the COVID-19 pandemic, calls for unity from politicians and public health experts contrasted sharply with the rising social divisions between vaccinated and unvaccinated people. Through 127 in-depth qualitative interviews conducted at two time points (October 2020 [n = 72], October 2021 [n = 55]) in Austria, a country with high vaccine hesitancy, this paper explores how and why deepening social divisions around vaccination occurred. Our fi…
‘My baby does not even drink water yet’
The notion of risk is decisive in childhood vaccination campaigns, yet parental and paediatricians’ understandings of risk are not necessarily congruent with formalised risk assessments. Likewise, formalised risk assessments tell us little about the (risk) work that policies entail for their target groups. We draw on the concept of risk work to examine how parents of infants and paediatricians negotiate vaccine-related risks in paediatric consult…
Towards a new policy analytical methodology in the study of vaccination governance
In the face of declining vaccine uptake, public health advocates and decision makers have emphasised the value of vaccination, expressing it in medical and technical terms and metrics, such as in the number of lives saved. This narrow and monolithic understanding of value conceals how different actors value and assess the importance of vaccination – for example, its scientific, economic, ethical, social or personal value. To capture the scientifi…
Political science (23 works) · Sociology (17 works) · Law (15 works) · Medicine (14 works) · Politics (11 works) · Public relations (11 works) · Vaccination (11 works) · Vaccine Coverage and Hesitancy (11 works) · Economics (8 works) · Law (8 works)