Biosecurity Interventions: Global Health and Security in Question

Edited by Andrew Lakoff and Stephen J. Collier

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October, 2008
Cloth, 312 pages,
ISBN: 978-0-231-14606-7
$29.50 / £20.50

"a thought-provoking volume that provides an important look into how far-reaching biosecurity is, while illustrating the ambiguities that still remain." — Somatosphere

"Provides insight into the complexity behind what it means to ‘secure health.’" — Sonja Kittelsen, Journal of Peace Research

"The essays collected here display an extravagant range, depth, and scale of insights, reflections, and explorations covering an extensive array of topics. Chapters cluster around the question of what to make of a burgeoning constellation of experts and the frequently incongruous (or inconclusive) claims to expertise that these experts produce. We learn about a vast range of incidents and episodes. We learn of the ever accelerating expansion of expertise and more expertise and the war-like rumblings of diverse organizational contests over territory and authority. Reading these chapters in and of themselves provides an education. They are instructive about the knowledge-dependence of major sectors of the contemporary world and how these knowledge-dependent sectors interface with and ramify from the micropractices of everyday life as well as strategic global initiatives." — from the epilogue by Paul Rabinow, professor of anthropology, University of California, Berkeley

Related Subjects

• Health
• International Affairs
• Security Studies

Series

• A Columbia / SSRC Book

About the Author

Andrew Lakoff is associate professor in the Department of Sociology and the Program in Science Studies, University of California, San Diego. His book Pharmaceutical Reason: Knowledge and Value in Global Psychiatry examines epistemological debates on the source of mental disorders. His current work focuses on the development of techniques of preparedness among security experts in the United States.

Stephen J. Collier is assistant professor in the Graduate Program in International Affairs at the New School. He is coeditor of Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics, and Ethics as Anthropological Problems and is completing a book on urbanism, social modernity, and neoliberal reform in contemporary Russia entitled Post-Soviet Social: "Neoliberalism" after the Washington Consensus. Currently he is engaged in research on new approaches to risk mapping and systems vulnerability.

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