ESHHS - CHEIRON Congress, our report about the "Epidemiological Factor"

Some days ago, we went to the ESHHS - CHEIRON congress that is being celebrating in the Psychology Faculty at our university (the Autonomous University of Barcelona) and we have exposed a communication about the role and the features of the biosurveillance at the second half of the 20th Century. That is what we called "The Epidemiological Factor". 

In this post, we want to offer you our speech as well as our slides if you are interested in the kind of topics we are working (and also we are so interested in hear you and talk with you!).

Here are the slides: http://prezi.com/t5f-ptz8vwag/?utm_campaign=share&utm_medium=copy

And this was the speech:

(slide 0): Hello everyone,

I’m Enrique Baleriola, a PhD Student from the Social Psychology Department at Autonomous University of Barcelona, and I will present our communication titled: The epidemiological factor: An analysis of the link between medicine and politics in the second half of the XX century.

The presentation is a product of my Research group POBICS, headed by Francisco Tirado, in which we are researching epidemics from a Social Studies of Science and Technology (STS) and Actor-Network Theory perspective. The central task of this theory is it to understand Science, Technology and Society as a seamless web: we cannot study the world as separate units but need to understand them in relation to the other ones.

In the present slides, we will offer a short view on a work-in-progress in which we look at the shift or change of biosurveillance at the second half of the Twentieth Century

What are we calling by biosurveillance?

(slide 1): We understand biosurveillance as a form of preparation, control, and/or containment exercise with respect to society and life within such society in order to avoid a or prepare for a present or future (bio)threat.

In this sense we will consider biosurveillance as a form of politics as the care for and intervention in present and future society must be understood not as neutral but as political intervention that is much more than only public-health issue.

(slide 2):  Therefore we see biosurveillance as an issue in which Science, Politics and everyday social life overlap.

(slide 3): Biosurveillance understood in this form could be defined best as a social-technical network where we find complex relationships between a lot of different actors like scientists, physicians, politicians… and not only people but also ideas, theories, objects like labs, documents, laws, fundings, power relations, etc.

Basing our research strongly on ANT and Latour’s works it is this complex network¡ what we are studying and analysing.

(slide 4): The concept of biosurveillance goes back to two authors that give us already a feeling with respect to the historical changes that biosurveillance underwent:

Partially the concept of biosurveillance goes back to the observation practices in dispositives of the discipline such as Michel Foucault’s Clinic. It is also strongly related to the popular concept of Biopolitics, developed in Foucault’s works on the Birth of Biopolitcs and used in slightly different forms by Giorgio Agamben, Toni Negri, Roberto Espósito, Nikolas Rose…

According to these authors we have to search for the basis of biosurveillance in the 19^th century as an important part of a governance through biopolitics. The strong and steady growth of the European cities during the Industrial Revolution and the birth of capitalism made new governance techniques necessary, and created new risks for the population in terms of health. As a consequence, medicine needed to shift and widen their actions to the general population (and not only those ones isolated in a close institution) with the aim of control population (birth and death ratio, number of children, disciplining bodies in factories…) in the background of the classical conception of biopolitics: from make die let live to make live let die (the popular quotation by Michel Foucault).

How did it happen? Disposittifs involved and explanations are countless, but only for mention someones: statistics or public hygiene programs.

(slide 5): In the 70s however society had undergone again some important changes, the end of World War II, the beginning of Cold War and the nuclear program, first computers and Internet-technology… in an ever-more connected world.

(slide 6): This is thet moment in which statistics begins to lose their key-role in contrast to new forms of preparation, control and containment. Threats and risks are everywhere and the growing connectedness and interdependence of the world makes preparation a crucial if not existential form of governance. In a global society in which the reaction to a risk must be quicker and more effective than ever, preparedness must further move towards the future, and must intervene stronger in the present.

Statistics becomes obsolete as a biosurveillance tool because now, threat are conceptualized as an any-place and any-moment threat, so we need to be prepared for before it occurs or happens. This is the motto of the preparedness-logic-of-the new biosurveillance based governance.

(slide 7): As a consequence preparedness must be created with new dispositives, dispositives that allow to intervene quicker, and more immediate.

A statistics based form of governance against threats, is  replaced by a governance scenarios. What is a scenario? Briefly, is a tale, a fictional narration given by experts in epidemics that bring them and all of us a knowledge that can be used in order to prevent an epidemic in Europe.

Scenarios are important because we think they are related with the state of emergency concept coined by Giorgio Agamben in his Homo Sacer. Because they create a grey zone: in which past, present and future disappears and because they do not differentiate between different actors and fields of knowledge; from politics to (bio)science; from the micro and the global scale, all dimensions merge somehow in a scenario.

We will show one video from an ebola-scenario in the UK at the final of our presentation.

   

(slide 8): To finish, we want to offer some implications of this biosurveillance currently:

First, the concept of Syndromic Surveillance, analysed by Leyla Fearnley. This concept refers to the use of Big Data intelligence to find the statistical aberration, that is, the pattern that doesn’t fit in the “normal”: a major number of searches in Google about influenza in January, for instance.

Second, the idea of scenarios as state-of-emergency that I said before. Only add that now, we are applying it to epidemic-images like outbreak-maps or ebola-images.

Third, Syndromic Observation as a new conceptualization of biosurveillance, where life, bios, becomes its own sentinel. It is not that people are controlled and watched by a panopticon (Foucault), but, for instance, that with my smartphone I can report to the Center for Dieseases and Control (CDC) in real time the evolution of my cough and fever; and also if my mother suddenly has the same symptoms like me. It can be extrapolated to ebola, hepatitis, zika virus, etc. Or also, that I can anticipate the number of deaths by malaria at the basis of the number of mosquitoes that this year survived to El Niño phenomenon.

Life watches life. Power changes from a statistical-panoptical form, to a vigilant power of not only myself (homo oeconomicus from Michel Foucault) in which common people are needed as a source of information and as active actors in order to make biosurveillance possible.

(slide 9): Finally, here is the mentioned scenario of ebola in the UK.

(slide 10): Biosurveillance shows us that science and politics are part of a seamless web between, that has changed in time and that needs to adapt in its form in order to make a preparation for those threats that will come possible.

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