Pathological Lives: Disease, Space and Biopolitics (RGS-IBG Book Series) - Softcover

`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

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