Columbia University Press
Biosecurity Interventions: Global Health & Security in Question
Key Metrics
- Andrew Lakoff
- Columbia University Press
- Hardcover
- 9780231146067
- 9.18 X 6.32 X 1.03 inches
- 1.18 pounds
- Political Science > Security (National & International)
- English
Secure TransactionBook Description
This volume provides a map of this complex and rapidly transforming terrain. The editors focus on how experts, public officials, and health practitioners work to define what it means to secure health through concrete practices such as global humanitarian logistics, pandemic preparedness measures, vaccination campaigns, and attempts to regulate potentially dangerous new biotechnologies.
As the contributions show, despite impressive activity in these areas, the field of biosecurity interventions remains unstable. Many basic questions are only beginning to be addressed: Who decides what counts as a biosecurity problem? Who is responsible for taking action, and how is the efficacy of a given intervention to be evaluated? It is crucial to address such questions today, when responses to new problems of health and security are still taking shape. In this context, this volume offers a form of critical and reflexive knowledge that examines how technical efforts to increase biosecurity relate to the political and ethical challenges of living with risk.
Author Bio
Andrew Lakoff holds a joint appointment in the Departments of Sociology and Communication. He was trained as an anthropologist of science and medicine, and has conducted research in Argentina, France and the United States. His areas of interest include globalization processes, the history of the human sciences, contemporary social theory, and risk society. Lakoff’s first book, Pharmaceutical Reason: Knowledge and Value in Global Psychiatry (Cambridge, 2005), examines the role of the global circulation of pharmaceuticals in the spread of biological models of human behavior.
He has also co-edited a book entitled Global Pharmaceuticals: Ethics, Markets, Practice (Duke, 2006), and has published articles on visual technology and the behavioral sciences, on the history of attention deficit disorder, on antidepressants and the placebo effect, and on forms of expertise in global health. Lakoff’s current research concerns the recent articulation of expertise in public health and security in a global context, and his recent book publications include the co-edited volume, Biosecurity Interventions: Global Health and Security in Question (Columbia University Press, 2008), and the edited volume Disaster and the Politics of Intervention (Columbia University Press, 2010).
His most recent book is Unprepared: Global Health in a Time of Emergency (University of California Press, 2017). Lakoff's next book, co-authored with Stephen J. Collier, is entitled The Government of Emergency: Vital Systems Security and the Birth of American Biopolitics, and is under contract with Princeton University Press.
Education
B.A. History, University of California, Berkeley
Ph.D. Sociocultural Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley
Source: University of Southern California
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