This thesis examines the Influenza A/H5N1 virus in action through an ethnographic study focused on the entwined concepts of risk and modernity. The objective is to explain why the response to the virus has been challenged in Indonesia.

Concerned with policy formulation, and everyday practice, the thesis argues that assemblages of historical, political, institutional and knowledge‐power processes create multiple hybrid constructions of risk and modernity, which challenge technical responses based on epistemological positions and institutional arrangements that do not allow for such hybridity.