Pathological Lives: Disease, Space and Biopolitics(RGS-IBG Book Series)

Pandemics, epidemics and food borne diseases are a major global challenge. Focusing on the food and farming sector, and mobilising social theory as well as empirical enquiry, Pathological Lives investigates current approaches to biosecurity and ask how pathological lives can be successfully ‘regulated’ without making life more dangerous as a result.   Uses empirical and social theoretical resources developed in the course of a 40-month research project entitled ‘Biosecurity borderlands’ Focuses on the food and farming sector, where the generation and subsequent transmission of disease has the ability to reach pandemic proportions Demonstrates the importance of a geographical and spatial analysis, drawing together social, material and biological approaches, as well as national and international examples The book makes three main conceptual contributions, reconceptualising disease as situated matters, the spatial or topological analysis of situations and a reformulation of biopolitics Uniquely brings together conceptual development with empirically and politically informed work on infectious and zoonotic disease, to produce a timely and important contribution to both social science and to policy debate

Table of Contents:
List of Figures ix Series Editors’ Preface x Acknowledgements xi Foreword xiii Part I Framing Pathological Lives 1 1 Pathological Lives – Disease, Space and Biopolitics 3 Introduction: The Emergency of Emergent Infectious Diseases 3 The Four Moves of Pathological Lives 8 References 21 2 Biosecurity and the Diagramming of Disease 25 Disease Diagrams 27 The Disease Multiple: Germs and the Return of the Outside 31 Biosecurity and the Diagramming of Disease 34 Conclusions 47 References 49 3 Reconfiguring Disease Situations 52 Disease Situations 54 Microbial Life and Contagion as Difference and Repetition 67 A Topological Disease Situation 72 Conclusions 80 References 81 Part II Disease Situations 87 Introduction 87 References 89 4 ‘Just?]in?]Time’ Disease: A Campylobacter Situation 91 Factory?]Farmed Chicken and Food?]borne Disease 93 Relational Economy of Disease 101 Powers of Life 107 Conclusions 108 References 109 5 The De?]Pasteurisation of England: Pigs, Immunity and the Politics of Attention 112 Birth of the Sty 113 Pigs in Practice – Fieldwork and Translations 119 Immunity, Attention and More?]than?]Human Responses 132 Conclusions 139 References 139 6 Attending to Meat 143 Introduction 143 Mapping the Current Landscape of Food Safety 144 A Failure of Coordination? 151 Inspection as Tending the Tensions of Food Safety 154 Being Stretched 162 Conclusions 164 References 166 7 A Surfeit of Disease: Or How to Make a Disease Public 169 The Media Background to Disease Publics 171 Publicising Disease: From Public ‘Understanding’ to ‘Engagement’ 174 Understanding and Engaging Disease Publics 177 Understanding the Surfeit 179 Conclusions: Making a Disease Public 187 References 189 8 Knowing Birds and Viruses – from Biopolitics to Cosmopolitics 192 Sensing Life 193 A Livelier Biopolitics and a Noisier Sentience 198 A Perceptual Ecology of Knowing Birds 200 Surveying Life 204 Knowing Viruses 206 The Significance of Observation 208 Conclusions 210 References 211 9 Conclusions – Living Pathological Lives 214 Time?]Space and Intra?]Actions 216 A livelier Politics of Life 218 A new Kind of Emergency? 220 References 222 Index 223

About the Author :
Steve Hinchliffe is Professor of Human Geography at Exeter University, UK. He is an elected Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and author and editor of numerous books and articles on issues ranging from risk and food, to biosecurity, urban ecologies and nature conservation. He sits on the UK’s Food Standards Agency Social Science Research Committee and has advised DEFRA on responses to exotic disease events. Nick Bingham is a Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Social Sciences, The Open University, UK. Nick’s current areas of research focus include the management of food safety, responses to the pollination crisis, and matters of coordination in smart cities. He is the author of numerous journal articles and book chapters and is joint editor of Contested Environments (with Andrew Blowers and Chris Belshaw, 2003). John Allen is Professor of Economic Geography in the Faculty of Social Sciences, The Open University, UK. His teaching and research experience includes work on issues of power and spatiality, more recently in relation to financialization, privatization, biopower and topology. His publications include Lost Geographies of Power (Oxford, Blackwell, 2003) and Topologies of Power: Beyond Territory and Networks (2016), in addition to numerous authored and edited books. Simon Carter is a Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Social Sciences, The Open University, UK. Hisresearch interests are in Science and Technology Studies, especially as applied to issues of health and medicine. Most recently, he has been working on an ESRC funded study into how biosecurity interfaces with other concerns in our globalized world. He is the author of Rise and Shine (2007) as well as numerous book chapters and journal articles.