Shoe-rubber Politics

Words on the doorstep

Shoe-rubber Politics

I’ve been talking to a lot of people about politics on their doorsteps this week (no – this is not a party-political broadcast: it’s too late for that).

And now, as results of the local elections in England, Wales and Scotland come in, I’ve been reflecting on the past few months of pounding the proverbial pavement, marching up and down steps, ringing buzzers, traveling up and down lifts and through long hallways, knocking on doors. And as I’ve done so I couldn’t help but think back to that classic figure from the 19th century: the shoe-leather epidemiologist.

I first heard the term shoe-leather tracer just two years ago, early in the Coronavirus pandemic, while doing some socially distanced socialising with my partner and a friend at the end of a hot day in May, not unlike today’s bright post-election Friday in London. My beloved and I sat side-by-side on camping chairs on the pavement just after dusk, our canine companion bouncing between us, while a dear friend perched on their front doorstep a few metres away. We were all – minus the terrier – dressed in shorts and t-shirts, sipping cold white wine while we aired and shared our doubts about how we would get through the next stage of life in the age of Coronavirus: contact tracing. Our friend, a specialist in public health, introduced me to the shoe-leather tracer: someone who would go door-to-door asking households about who had Covid symptoms, had developed the illness, and so on.

Shoe-leather epidemiology has its origins about 170 years ago and some six miles from where I enjoyed my late-night glass of Sauvignon back in 2020. In the summer of 1854 Dr John Snow, a physician in London’s Soho district, identified a water pump in Broad Street as the origin of a cholera outbreak which had killed 500 people in the area. In the process he proved the waterborne theory of cholera transmission and paved the way for the elimination of the disease.  According to one group of medical geographers, the Snow story has all the elements of a classic myth: “short, dramatic, and heroic … it recounts events that may or may not be true: it is a way for us to make sense of something that is not truly knowable or understandable.” Because his method of disease control involved conducting house-to-house surveys in infected neighbourhoods, Snow has been dubbed “the father of shoe-leather epidemiology''.

Shoe-leather tracing “raises the image of an on-the-ground investigation racing to find a solution to a deadly epidemic”. The term has also been applied to journalism, used to mean “basic, direct of old-fashioned methods” of reporting, i.e. the kind that involve hitting the streets in search of a good story and eye witnesses, rather than sitting at a desk or relying on information technology and social media.

Of course, as the pandemic proved, tracking infections in the 21st century also involves the mass collection of digital data. The same is true of of modern-day elections. Yet there’s something irreplaceable about the exchange of words on the doorstep. While door-knockers during election time – “canvassers” as we called them in Canada when I was a kid – may not have quite the glamour of the life-saving shoe-leather tracker, we do have lots of stories to share about our ephemeral doorstep encounters, meetings that reveal lots about the vicissitudes of electoral politics and activism.

So next week I’ll be back with some reflections on shoe-rubber politics.

In the meantime, if you can, be sure to get beyond the doorstep this weekend and enjoy the sun 🌞