Bioinsecurity and Vulnerability

by Nancy N. Chen (Editor), Lesley A. Sharp (Editor)

“Biosecurity” has ballooned into an increasingly mundane aspect of human experience, serving as a catchall for the detection, surveillance, containment, and deflection of everything from epidemics and natural disasters to resource scarcities and political insurgencies. The bundling together of security measures, its associated infrastructure, and its modes of governance alongside response times underscores a new urgency of preparedness—a growing global ethos ever alert to unforeseen danger—and actions that favor risk assessment, imagined worst-case scenarios, and carefully orchestrated, preemptive interventions. The contributors to Bioinsecurity and Vulnerability understand biosecurity to be a practice that links national identity with the securitization of daily governance. They argue against biosecurity as the new status quo by focusing instead on its ugly underbelly. Through considering the vulnerability of individuals and groups, particularly looking at how vulnerability propagates in the shadow of biosecurity, this volume challenges the acceptance of surveillance and security measures as necessities of life in the new millennium.

390 pages, Kindle Edition

First published December 8, 2014

About the author

Nancy N. Chen is Professor of Anthropology at Scripps College. She is the author of Food, Medicine, and the Quest for Good Health and Breathing Spaces: Qigong, Psychiatry, and Healing in China.