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!).
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 19th
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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