Epidemics in an Era of Globalization
May 3-5, 2007
How have the causes and the consequences of epidemics changed in this era of globalization? Epidemics have always been both social and biological phenomena, a matter of the movement of people and capital as much as of microbes. But the connection between social, political, and economic forces and the distribution of health and disease has never seemed more clear-or more critical-than in this age of unprecedented international travel, trade, and migration.
In recent years, policy makers, analysts, and scholars have cast the critical connection between socio-political and biological realities in a striking new form: depicting infectious disease as a security threat, one that operates either directly (by passing infections across porous national borders) or indirectly (by creating political and economic instability in affected regions). We will chart this rise of biosecurity in both discourse and practice, exploring how such an expanded notion of security might impact responses to infectious disease in official policy as well as in the popular imagination. What happens, for example, when issues of public health collide with human rights? What are the potential risks or rewards of an encounter between disease and national defense, or between individual bodies and the body politic of which they are part?
Throughout the seminar, we will consider how globalization has impacted the movement of particular diseases: looking at the spread and impact of HIV/AIDS in the global south or at current concerns about avian flu. We also will consider how the term "epidemic" itself has moved: migrating beyond infectious disease to refer to increasingly prevalent conditions like diabetes or obesity. What are the stakes or the effects of a label like "obesity epidemic," a label often used to describe the impact of globalization or "coca-colonization" on traditional ways of living and of eating? Finally, as this rhetoric of colonization suggests, the link between globalization and disease is not new. Over the course of the long history of colonialism and international trade, the movement of people and of goods has affected how health and disease are distributed across different populations. We will keep this long history in mind as we consider contemporary cases, looking back at historical precedents in order to explore the striking continuities and significant discontinuities between this past and our present moment.
Epidemics exist at the intersection not only of past and present, but also of a host of different orders: between medical science and the social imaginary, between public health and national security, between the human body and the body politic. In order to better understand the movements of such multifaceted phenomena, this seminar will draw on contributions from a host of different disciplines in the humanities, the social sciences, and the biological sciences.
Speakers will include: Jean Comaroff (Anthropology), Lauren Berlant (English), Susan Burns (History/Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations), Joseph Masco (Anthropology), John Schumann (Medicine) and Robert Daum (Infectious Diseases).
University of Chicago