Disentangling the Protection Suit: Images, Artefacts, and the Making of the Health-Security Nexus

Abstract

The protection suit is the icon of infectious disease outbreaks. I argue that the protection suit has performative power not only by shaping the daily tasks of health workers and their interaction with patients, but also as a visual artefact and as a two-dimensional image determining how health crises and their security implications are understood and dealt with. The article proceeds in three steps: it firstly highlights the current absence of visuality in the academic literature on health security and makes the case for including it in the debate. Secondly, with recourse to Actor-Network Theory (ANT) it theoretically locates visual representations, as images and artefacts, as actors that act and enact each other in the health-security nexus. The third part of the article follows the protection suit during the Ebola epidemic in West Africa and maps the visual network it creates. In doing so this article demonstrates how the suit as artefact and image constitutes a network that visually and sensually links the bodies of patients, health workers and distant viewers in complex and at times competing makings of health security.

Progressive and Regressive Securitisation: Covid, Russian Aggression and the Ethics of Security

“…Furthermore, in comparison to climate change, which also causes many deaths and has devastating consequences on people's lives, the securitisation of Covid-19 demonstrates various felicity conditions for a successful securitisation. The seemingly unstoppable global spread of the pandemic versus the unevenly distributed natural disasters caused by climate change; the images of piles of dead bodies without any visible cause compared to the havoc caused by floods and storms that are not unique in history but 'only' occur with a higher frequency (on the importance of images in the securitisation of health issues, see Krause 2021); the undisputed linkage between these deaths and the virus opposed to the statistical uncertainty and long-term effects of climate change -all of these point to the importance of the threat characteristics and its possible visualisations in the securitising process.…”