Pathological Lives : Disease, Space and Biopolitics

Pandemics, epidemics and food borne diseases have become one of the key challenges for contemporary global society. 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.

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 proportionsDemonstrates the importance of a geographical and spatial analysis, drawing together social, material and biological approaches, as well as national and international examplesThe book makes three main conceptual contributions, reconceptualising disease as situated matters, the spatial or topological analysis of situations and a reformulation of biopoliticsUniquely 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