Promotional Information

The essays collected here display an extravagant range, depth, and scale of insights, reflections, and explorations covering an extensive array of topics. Chapters cluster around the question of what to make of a burgeoning constellation of experts and the frequently incongruous (or inconclusive) claims to expertise that these experts produce. We learn about a vast range of incidents and episodes. We learn of the ever accelerating expansion of expertise and more expertise and the war-like rumblings of diverse organizational contests over territory and authority. Reading these chapters in and of themselves provides an education. They are instructive about the knowledge-dependence of major sectors of the contemporary world and how these knowledge-dependent sectors interface with and ramify from the micropractices of everyday life as well as strategic global initiatives. -- from the epilogue by Paul Rabinow, professor of anthropology, University of California, Berkeley

Table of Contents

1. The Problem of Securing Health, by Stephen J. Collier and Andrew Lakoff 2. From Population to Vital System: National Security and the Changing Object of Public Health, by Andrew Lakoff 3. Redesigning Syndromic Surveillance for Biosecurity, by Lyle Fearnley 4. How Did the Smallpox Vaccination Program Come About? Tracing the Emergence of Recent Smallpox Vaccination Thinking, by Dale A. Rose 5. Disease as Security Threat: Critical Reflections on the Global TB Emergency, by Erin Koch 6. Vital Mobility and the Humanitarian Kit, by Peter Redfield 7. Mapping the Multiplicities of Biosecurity, by Nick Bingham and Steve Hinchliffe 8. From Mad Cow Disease to Bird Flu: Transformations of Food Safety in France, by Frederic Keck 9. Biodefense: Considering the Sociotechnical Dimension, by Kathleen M. Vogel 10. Anticipations of Biosecurity, by Carlo Caduff Afterword. Episodes or Incidents: Seeking Significance, by Paul Rabinow Acknowledgments List of Contributors Index

About the Author

Andrew Lakoff is associate professor in the Department of Sociology and the Program in Science Studies, University of California, San Diego. His book Pharmaceutical Reason: Knowledge and Value in Global Psychiatry examines epistemological debates on the source of mental disorders. His current work focuses on the development of techniques of preparedness among security experts in the United States. Stephen J. Collier is assistant professor in the Graduate Program in International Affairs at the New School. He is coeditor of Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics, and Ethics as Anthropological Problems and is completing a book on urbanism, social modernity, and neoliberal reform in contemporary Russia entitled Post-Soviet Social: "Neoliberalism" after the Washington Consensus. Currently he is engaged in research on new approaches to risk mapping and systems vulnerability.

Reviews

a thought-provoking volume that provides an important look into how far-reaching biosecurity is, while illustrating the ambiguities that still remain. Somatosphere Provides insight into the complexity behind what it means to 'secure health.' -- Sonja Kittelsen Journal of Peace Research