New papers and topics by POBICS

Hi everyone again!

POBICS is coming back and in this ocassion we want to offer you a little panorama about our current works. We are working on several papers and (related) topics indeed, so we think is a good moment in order to talk about it and show them. There we go:

Fear and panic: we are working in a paper (one that was born from one of our proposal to the 4S/EASST congress). In this paper, we will expose why fear and panic are important in the risk management carried out by governments, institutions and agencies related to biorisk and biosurveillance. We will also describe how panic mediates between governance and liberty; and what is the role of lay-people (citizens aliened to biomedical expert knowledge) in that triade panic-liberty-governance.

Ebola and images: Although we have posted about it recently, we want to remember it because we think is an important topic given the even more importance of images in our daily life, as well as in social research. We bet for a work where the last ebola outbreak in 2014 would be linked to the images produced in that momento by newspapers, Internet, experts, governments, etc. The sense beyond this work is to describe what king of knowledge are being constructed around ebola, and what particular role would had this kind of images.

Drones and epidemics: We are also interesting in analyse how drone's new technology can be linked with epidemics in terms of surveillance and outbreak's detection. This is the topic we have less clear currently, but we are gathering several documents and other material in order to analyse it and open a new path with the implications and possible uses of drones in an epidemics situation or scenario.

Photo Credit: See-ming Lee