Security, Disease, Commerce: Ideologies of Postcolonial Global Health

King, Nicholas B.

doi:10.1177/030631202128967406

Cited by 217 publications

(249 citation statements)

References 0 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

220

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…Global health programs are increasingly focused on notions of biosecurity and biodefense (King, 2002(King, , 2005, another mode of anticipation (Lentzos, 2006). Tactics of biosecurity promote the notion that epidemic disasters are if not the only then at least the most important contemporary large-scale international and local public health issues (Lakoff and Collier, 2008).…”

Section: Exemplary Sites Of Anticipatory Practice: Biomedical and Genmentioning

confidence: 99%

Anticipation: Technoscience, life, affect, temporality

2009

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

One defining quality of our current moment is its characteristic state of anticipation, of thinking and living toward the future. Anticipation has epistemic value, a virtue emerging through actuarial saturation as sciences of the actual are displaced by speculative forecast. It is a politics of temporality and affect. Key dimensions are: injunction as the moral imperative to characterize and inhabit states of uncertainty; abduction as requisite tacking back and forth between futures, pasts and presents, framing templates for producing the future; optimization as the moral responsibility of citizens to secure their 'best possible futures'; preparedness as living in 'preparation for' potential trauma; and possibility as 'ratcheting up' hopefulness, especially through technoscience. Anticipation is the palpable sense that things could be (all) right if we leverage new spaces of opportunity, reconfiguring 'the possible.' We illustrate exemplary sites of anticipatory practice, especially biomedical, highlighting how such sites are gendered, increasingly implicating young girls.

show abstract

Section: Exemplary Sites Of Anticipatory Practice: Biomedical and Genmentioning

confidence: 99%

Anticipation: Technoscience, life, affect, temporality

2009

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…As historian of medicine Nicholas King and other scholars have pointed out, public health, national security and international commerce have always been in a close relationship, especially in the United States (King, 2001(King, , 2002. In the notorious form of quarantine, systematic efforts to isolate potential carriers of infectious germs so as to prevent pandemics and protect populations have been at the heart of security measures mobilized by the state as a drastic means to maintain its sovereignty and control its borders (Baldwin, 1999).…”

Section: Public Health and National Securitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Public prophylaxis: Pandemic influenza, pharmaceutical prevention and participatory governance

Caduff

2010

BioSocieties

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

In this article, I explore recent discussions among American public health professionals over how to protect the health of the nation in a state of emergency. My focus is specifically on questions of preventative strategy and population management, examining intensive debates around the prioritization of protective vaccine for pandemic influenza. Drawing on ethnographic research, I show how the mode of circulation, distribution and allocation of pandemic vaccine was gradually refashioned in the United States over the past 2 years. When government officials launched public engagement meetings reformulating in ethical terms the crucial question of how to dispense a scarce pharmaceutical resource in a public health emergency, a distinctive set of priorities emerged. My aim, in this article, is to examine this ethical refashioning and to interrogate the curious logics of public-ness that are increasingly embedded in a growing number of approaches of public health professionals. How are populations gathered into the fold of pharmaceutical prevention today?

show abstract

“…As might be anticipated from our introduction, this reading is informed by Foucauldian approaches to discourse analysis (Foucault, 1977). However, we are also influenced by King's (2002) notion of the 'worldview' because, similarly to Foucault, it highlights the ways in which discourse acts to shape a discursive field and, in so doing, to limit one's 'field of vision'. As we go on to argue, this was an important element of the global strategy because it helped to integrate or 'enframe' nations not normally linked to health-related problems associated with non-communicable diseases.…”

Section: Situating the Global Strategymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…However, more importantly, we believe that it is in such interventions that a sense of the post-colonial rather than the imperial emerges. Put differently, although the nations represented by G77 and China were, in King's (2002) terms, integrated into the strategy, they were in no way passive as regards their response(s) to it.…”

Section: A Post-colonial Strategy?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Imperial or postcolonial governance? Dissecting the genealogy of a global public health strategy

Brown

Bell

2008

Social Science & Medicine

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

During the last decades of the twentieth century it became increasingly apparent that the inter-relationship between globalisation and health is extremely complex. This complexity is highlighted in debates surrounding the re-emergence of infectious diseases, where it is recognised that the processes of globalisation have combined to create the conditions where once localised, microbial hazards have come to pose a threat to many western nations. By contrast, in an emerging literature relating to the epidemic of non-communicable diseases, and reflected in the WHO 'Global strategy on diet, physical activity and health', it is the so-called 'western lifestyle' that has been cast as the main threat to a population's health. This paper explores critically global responses to this development. Building on our interest in questions of governance and the ethical management of the healthy body, we examine, whether the global strategy, in seeking to contain the influence of a 'western lifestyle', also promotes contemporary 'western-inspired' approaches to public health practices. The paper indicates that a partial reading of the WHO strategy suggests that certain countries, especially those outside the West, are being captured or 'enframed' by the integrative ambitions of a western 'imperial' vision of global health. However, when interpreted critically through a post-colonial lens, we argue that 'integration' is more complex, and that the subtle and dynamic relations of power that exist between countries of the West/non-West, are exposed. IntroductionOn May 22, 2004 the 192-member World Health Assembly, the main decisionmaking body of the World Health Organization (WHO), endorsed a 'Global strategy on diet, physical activity and health'. As Dr Lee Jong-wook, the DirectorGeneral of WHO, announced, "This is a landmark achievement in global public health policy" (WHO, 2004. Emphasis added). Such a reference to the global reach of the strategy is significant as it appears to endorse further the idea that the 'global' has replaced the 'national' in public health discourse. Indeed, the belief that public health has transcended national borders and boundaries is reflected in the current literature. Much of this literature can be organised into three distinct areas: the history of the transformation from national to global public health (see Loughlin and Berridge, 2002;Bashford, 2006;Brown, Cueto and Fee, 2006); the links between globalisation and the (re)emergence of infectious diseases in the West (see Garrett, 1995Garrett, , 1996Heymann and Rodier, 2001;Ali and Keil, 2006); and, the association between westernisation and the global transfer of risks factors for so-called 'diseases of comfort' (see Yach and Bettcher, 1998;McMichael and Beaglehole, 2000;Beaglehole and Yach, 2003).This globalising of public health discourse was the focus of previous research by the authors (see Brown and Bell, 2007). In this work we argued that the WHO Manuscript

show abstract

Security, Disease, Commerce: Ideologies of Postcolonial Global Health

Cited by 217 publications

References 0 publications

Anticipation: Technoscience, life, affect, temporality

Anticipation: Technoscience, life, affect, temporality

Public prophylaxis: Pandemic influenza, pharmaceutical prevention and participatory governance

Imperial or postcolonial governance? Dissecting the genealogy of a global public health strategy

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About