Incoming my first book! Biosecurity and Biopolitics in the XXI Century

As I have commented occasionally, the last year we achieved the fund by the Brazilian Government in order to write a book with the partnership of some brazilian researchers.

Now, this week ends the deadline to send all the chapters writen by several researchers around the world in order to compile, translate and edit the book. My research group and me perform as writers (one chapter and the introduction) and as editors (compiling, alerting people, talkin with our partners in Brazil..), so in this month (while the congress and other researches was carrying on), we was busy in some related tasks.

But, at last! this month is running out, so we have to finish all the issues soon and move on till other kind of stuff.

Today I have a break, so I want to talk about our chapter in this book, particularlly, I want to post the abstract and some ideas about it.

"In the last two decades, biosecurity has emerged as a key issue in the sociocultural and political agenda of the European Union. Legislation, regulations, protocols, specialization courses, outreach programs and public awareness, hygiene practices, etc. shape a collection of discourses and practices that make of the security of the bios a new field of analysis for the social sciences. 

Some authors have begun to argue that the emergence of such practices and discourses involves the configuration of new control devices and regulation of both citizens and populations. In this vein, it is argued that biosecurity essentially defines a transformation of the old security mechanisms and involves the emergence of new and sophisticated devices where the biological regulation plays a fundamental role. 

In this work, however, based on a case study on the notion of biosurveillance practices and discourses that biosafety implements the European Union, we will set a different argument. We shall argue that the real break that biosecurity suposses is not at the level of definition of the security conception but ​​in a complete transformation of the notion of "life". 

In that sense, we show that the "living" or the biotic acquires a new intelligibility in the game of new coordinates provided by biosecurity. We will argue that this is not developing measures to restrict, control or ban but  the generation of what we have called "regimes of vitality". These are frames or intelligibility's epistemes that dictate how must be the "good-living" or the "living safety", how life must be understood that is worth be lived and how to conceive the relationship between risk and normal."

As you can see, a key concept is "regime of vitality". You can check some ideas about it here in a text writen by Jorge Castillo, Francisco Tirado and Ana Gálvez (Foucault also wrote some about it when he talked about "regimes of truth"). In this vein, what we are seeking is some elments related with biosecurity where we would discuss about if a new regime of vitality about life is being created. When the book was published, I will write some details about it (I hope we continue researching about this interesting term).

As always, I want to share this post in order to discuss some terms, empirial datas, and exchange some points of view. What do you think about it? Do yo know where we can find some documents related with our task?

Photo Credit: Flickr, user Pete Ashton