Pandemics, epidemics and food borne diseases are a major global challenge. Focusing on the food and farming sector, and mobilising social theory as well as empirical enquiry, Pathological Lives investigates current approaches to biosecurity and ask how pathological lives can be successfully 'regulated' without making life more dangerous as a result.* Uses empirical and social theoretical resources developed in the course of a 40-month research project entitled 'Biosecurity borderlands'* Focuses on the food and farming sector, where the generation and subsequent transmission of disease has the ability to reach pandemic proportions* Demonstrates the importance of a geographical and spatial analysis, drawing together social, material and biological approaches, as well as national and international examples* The book makes three main conceptual contributions, reconceptualising disease as situated matters, the spatial or topological analysis of situations and a reformulation of biopolitics* Uniquely brings together conceptual development with empirically and politically informed work on infectious and zoonotic disease, to produce a timely and important contribution to both social science and to policy debate

List of Figures ixSeries Editors' Preface xAcknowledgements xiForeword xiiiPart I Framing Pathological Lives 11 Pathological Lives - Disease, Space and Biopolitics 3Introduction: The Emergency of Emergent Infectious Diseases 3The Four Moves of Pathological Lives 8References 212 Biosecurity and the Diagramming of Disease 25Disease Diagrams 27The Disease Multiple: Germs and the Return of the Outside 31Biosecurity and the Diagramming of Disease 34Conclusions 47References 493 Reconfiguring Disease Situations 52Disease Situations 54Microbial Life and Contagion as Difference and Repetition 67A Topological Disease Situation 72Conclusions 80References 81Part II Disease Situations 87Introduction 87References 894 'Just-in-Time' Disease: A Campylobacter Situation 91Factory-Farmed Chicken and Food-borne Disease 93Relational Economy of Disease 101Powers of Life 107Conclusions 108References 1095 The De-Pasteurisation of England: Pigs, Immunity and the Politics of Attention 112Birth of the Sty 113Pigs in Practice - Fieldwork and Translations 119Immunity, Attention and More-than-Human Responses 132Conclusions 139References 1396 Attending to Meat 143Introduction 143Mapping the Current Landscape of Food Safety 144A Failure of Coordination? 151Inspection as Tending the Tensions of Food Safety 154Being Stretched 162Conclusions 164References 1667 A Surfeit of Disease: Or How to Make a Disease Public 169The Media Background to Disease Publics 171Publicising Disease: From Public 'Understanding' to 'Engagement' 174Understanding and Engaging Disease Publics 177Understanding the Surfeit 179Conclusions: Making a Disease Public 187References 1898 Knowing Birds and Viruses - from Biopolitics to Cosmopolitics 192Sensing Life 193A Livelier Biopolitics and a Noisier Sentience 198A Perceptual Ecology of Knowing Birds 200Surveying Life 204Knowing Viruses 206The Significance of Observation 208Conclusions 210References 2119 Conclusions - Living Pathological Lives 214Time-Space and Intra-Actions 216A livelier Politics of Life 218A new Kind of Emergency? 220References 222Index 223