This public event at LSE next week may be of interest to some...
Disrupting the circulation of viruses, challenging public health’s role in global governance
Niamh Stephenson
University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia (currently visiting at BIOS)
13th November 2008 - 5-7pm
Room H102 (1st Floor, Connaught House)
Many of the threats facing global public health today take the form of emerging infectious diseases (EID). Epidemiologists attribute EID, in part, to the intensification of the ‘free circulation’ of commodities, people, expertise and capital transnationally. Public health responses to EID rarely try to interrupt this mobility of goods and information. Rather they extend the rationale of free circulation through efforts to intensify movement and communication between international agencies, national health (and defence) departments and the pharmaceutical industry. In this way public health adopts a role in extending (post)liberal modes of transnational regulation.
This paper examines one unfolding challenge to public health’s reluctance to defy the ethos of international trade agreements. Indonesia has withdrawn from WHO’s ‘virus sharing’ scheme. Indonesian samples of H5N1 sent to WHO have been used, not only to identify pathogens, but for the commercial development of potentially profitable vaccines. WHO, Indonesia claims, is acting outside of the Convention on Biological Diversity which states that those profiting from biological samples need to ‘share benefits’ with the states providing those samples. I examine how Indonesia’s move both exposes public health’s role in global governance and compels WHO to do more than acknowledge the massive North/South inequities of access to vaccines for EID. The paper considers both: how the international response continues to extend the role played by public health in the development of (post)liberal global governance; and asks if this disruption of free circulation constitutes an escape that will force the development of new modes of transnational regulation.
Speaker BIO: Niamh Stephenson is a Senior Lecturer in Social Science at the University of New South Wales, and currently on sabbatical at BIOS, LSE.
Her recent book, Escape Routes: Control and Subversion in the 21st Century, interrogates how postliberal regimes of control are impacting on the politics of experience in the fields of health, labour and migration (co-authored with Dimitris Papadopoulos and Vassilis Tsianos, Pluto Press).
She is interested in the role of experience in socio-political change (as in Analysing Everyday Experience: Social Research and Political Change, Palgrave, co-authored with Dimitris Papadopoulos) and is currently researching how biopolitics unfolds without taking the population as its object.
All welcome, no ticket required. Seats allocated on a first-come, first served basis.
Map of LSE and surrounding area: http://www.lse.ac.uk/resources/mapsAndDirections/
This seminar will be followed by a drinks reception in the BIOS Centre, V1100 (11th floor, Tower 2).
Please access the attached hyperlink for an important electronic communications disclaimer: http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/secretariat/legal/disclaimer.htm
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