About maps

As I pointed out in the last post, movement is a key concept in the new regime of (bio)politics, becoming a central issue of what we conceive as cinepolitics. Thus, the topic of today is about one source of information understudied yet in social sciences: maps.

We are studying maps as a technology-as-mediator as Latour says, that is, we conceive maps as an element inside of a net where the actant (in this case, biosurveillance), is constituted. We are currently managing several theories in order to analyse maps, as the Panorama Concept by Latour, or the difference between observation andsurveillance that Michel Serres proposes. We are also trying to apply the Deleuzian concept of diagram in order to explain how maps works as an element that folds scales between a very local event and a global issue, deterritorializing and reterritorializing the cinepolitics entanglement and completing the management process in a total-surveillance-world. We will write about an interesting topic soon, called Global Assemblages.

However, what kind of maps and why this kind of illustrations? Inside Actor-Network Theory there is a large tradition of social studies of sciences where images, maps and graphics have an important role as an immutable mobile, that is, as a key form to translate the knowledge created in a laboratory to expand it outside and with the purpose of connecting with other laboratories, sources of fund, citizenships, power positions, etc. This kind of information are very important in ethnographical studies as Latour or Law as we can read in the classic study of how a scientist works in order to achieve a graphic where is gathered the whole knowledge, practises and others elements that shape a heart’ rat performance.

Hence, we have collected several CDC and WHO maps in order to study infectious vectors movement (ebolavirus, N1H1, AIDS, SARS…). I cannot advance much conclusions, but what we are inquiring is a shift in the form as biosurveillance works from this spotlight in the movement at the beginning of XXI century.

References:

Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the Social. New York: Oxford University Press.

Serres, M. (2008). The Five Senses. London: Continuum. 

Tirado, F. (2008). Michel Foucault: biopolítica e intuición de la cinepolítica. Congress: Aportes de Michel Foucault al pensamiento contemporáneo. Barcelona.

Photo Credit: Flickr user, Ann Martin.