50. Fraught politics of emergence and neglect in Global Health
Bernardo Moreno Peniche, UC Berkeley; Lina Beatriz Pinto-Garcia, Universidad de los Andes
Posted: February 28, 2022 Accepted Languages: English/Inglés/Inglês, Spanish/Español/Espanhol, Portuguese/Portugués
Under the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, zoonoses (diseases transmitted by nonhuman vertebrates) and vector-borne diseases have both regained attention and undergone disregard. Straddling between emergence and neglect, Global Health’s approach to these diseases has been organized around two main regimes of care—biosecurity and humanitarianism (Lakoff 2010). Biosecurity operates under an “emergent diseases worldview” (King 2002:767), which sees globalization as a territorial transgression where the emergence of certain pathogens in particular geographies unleashes anxieties of a world on the verge of disappearance—“a third-worlding at home” (King 2002:773). From eradication to preparedness, biosecurity defends health through implementation and reinforcement of discursive and material boundaries designed to secure hierarchical distinctions between spaces and the bodies that inhabit them (Hinchliffe et al. 2013). Such divisions are not unlike those that, from a humanitarian perspective, the category of ‘neglected tropical diseases’ (NTDs) pays attention to. Typically regarded as diseases of poverty, NTDs are believed to be unable to attract big pharma’s lucrative interests and investment in research and development. As such, NTDs become targets of organized compassion structured along the lines of class, gender, race, nationality, and species (Ticktin 2019). Yet, just as biosecurity and its focus on emergence, humanitarian regimes of care often sidestep the political and ecological histories that underpin neglect. With these histories as starting points, this panel welcomes contributions that engage critically and speculatively with the articulations and disjunctures between emergence and neglect, as well as with the various configurations of care that zoonoses and vector-borne diseases entail.
