Biovigilant citizenship. A new paper is coming!

A month and a half later, we are ending our paper about biovigilant citizenship. Although we wrote some points about it in March, now is when we are reviewing the result and so, we will have a new document ready to be send very soon. 

Finally, the paper brings a landscape where we gather the main theories about the classical citizenship: we begin with a brief abstract from Greece to the 20th Century, talking about the citizen condition and liking it to the main features in each time: classic right, marxism, liberalism...

In a second moment, we focus on these studies that works with new kinds of understand the citizen: Nikolas Rose, Aiwa Ong, Petryna... all of them link the citizen condition to the "bio" condition, each one within their current work (tissues and organs, catastrophes, biohazards...).

Then, we offer our particular vision bringing a new feature to the path opened by these lasts authors. In this vein, we present the biovigilant citizenship as those citizenship that is "invited" not only to be watched, but also being an active vigilant about any kind of biological risk (a new epidemics, an odd man that is bleeding in the street...).

To illustrate it, we work with some images anddocumentos by the WHO and we do a first analysis about HealthMap, an app for smartphones that allows anyone to alert and inform about new cases or biohazards; and also allows to watch if close to his home there is a reported virus or bacteria. Along the analysis we focus on the "paraskeue" or equipment concept given by Michel Foucault.

In the conclusions paragraph, we wide the conception of biovigilant citizenship and we also point out some points about further studies.

Photo Credit: Flickr, user Sascha Kohlmann.

Biovigilant citizenship

Another month, another monday I am writing a new post for the blog. In this case, I want to point out some ideas about a new paper we are clarifying, and it is about the role of citizenship within biosurveillance. 

The first we made is to build the index, and it has remained as follows:

1. Introduction: We talk about our current moment and their main events: the heightening of bio-sciences, Big-Data, DNA researches, pandemics, anthrax, ebola... and then we frame it within the preparedness logic of government: scenario-planning, biorisk, etc. We also remark some aspects of our theoretical framework: Social studies of Science and Technology, and Actor-Network Theory.

2. What is citizenship?: Starting with a brief review about the classical conception of citizenship (in Roma and Greece, the republican vision), we meander till the Marxist's conception of citizenship going through the liberal conception (with Hobbes or Marshall, for instance). 

3. New citizenships: From the beginning of the 21th Century, as many authors have pointed out (i.e Nikolas Rose or Petryna), and in part on the basis of the panorama given in the introduction, some new conceptions of citizenships have emerged. We discuss them here and we also give some key points of each one (we also talk about the biosecure citizenship of Kezia Barker for instance).

4. Biovigilant citizenship: In the fourth paragraph, we want to present our own proposal within these new categories of citizenship, the biovigilant citizenship. However, in which consists it? Well, I cannot advance so much, but our concept is constructed using the Foucault's idea of paraskeue or equipment. In this vein, we affirm the existence of some equipments that allows citizenship to become biovigilant, in the sense of watch and be watched. Is here where we present our empirical data to support our thesis.

5. Conclusions: We aim to problematize the naïf role of citizenship as a mere collaborator in the alert and detection of new outbreaks, and we conclude with the idea that this equipment becomes normal a very concrete regime of veridiction, with quite interesting implications.

So, what do you think about it? We can really talk about a new kind of citizenship, or is only a concrete and not so important feature? Do you think another term would be more interesting?

This papers will be send in May, so we have to wait until Christmas (more or less) to have it published. We will keep reporting!

Photo Credit: Flickr, user Bernard Goldbach