Pathological Lives

Disease, Space and Biopolitics

By: Steve Hinchliffe, Nick Bingham, John Allen, Simon Carter

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Paperback | 23 December 2016 | Edition Number 1

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272 Pages

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22.86 x 14.99 x 1.27

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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 on 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.

Industry Reviews

‘Pathological Lives is much more than an original contribution to the analysis of biosecurity and biopolitics. It shows us how an attentiveness to the complexity of situations can also generate vital normative conclusions.’
Andrew Barry, Chair of Human Geography and Vice-Dean (Interdisciplinarity), University College London

‘Multi-species worlds also include pathogenic microbes. How, for better or worse, to co-exist with these and face the challenges they pose – whilst avoiding the tropes of total warfare and eradication? Pathological Lives is an acute and well-researched book that bravely faces up to this concern and that sets the scene for a new wave of fresh thinking about biopolitics.’
Annemarie Mol, Professor of Anthropology of the Body, The University of Amsterdam

‘Pathological Lives offers an illuminating new approach to the problem of emerging infectious disease. The authors outline a relational understanding of disease where host and infective agent are held together by infrastructures of greater or lesser pathogenicity. This book is a rare thing in contemporary social science: a combination of close ethnographic study, critical policy analysis, and a profound philosophical intervention into contemporary theories of life, biopolitics and emergence.’
Melinda Cooper, Associate Professor of Sociology and Social Policy, The University of Sydney

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