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
Pandemics, epidemics and food borne diseases have, for some at least, become key challenges for contemporary global society. They threaten progress in global health, compromise food security, and, along with climate change and global terrorism, seem to usher in a state of emergency and a radically uncertain future. The central claim of
Pathological Lives is that any solution offered to these kinds of emerging and often communicable diseases requires a broad-based geographical scrutiny. The book marks an empirically and theoretically informed contribution to a world seemingly under constant microbiological threat, drawing together and extending empirically based geographical scholarship in human-environment relations, science and society, more than human geographies and spatial theory to understand and evaluate efforts at making life more secure. The focus is on the food and farming sector, where the generation and subsequent transmission of disease can reach pandemic proportions. The authors review current approaches to biosecurity or making life safe within those sectors, analyse underlying drivers and logics to existing programmes and ask whether the resulting solutions can succeed. They follow farmers, retailers and regulators, amongst others, asking how pathological lives can be successfully 'regulated' without making life more dangerous as a result.
