Polity Press
Planning for the Wrong Pandemic: Covid-19 and the Limits of Expert Knowledge
Key Metrics
- Andrew Lakoff
- Polity Press
- Hardcover
- 9781509557271
- -
- -
- Social Science > Sociology - General
- English
Secure TransactionBook Description
Planning for the Wrong Pandemic takes a different approach. Without dismissing such accounts, it begins with the observation that much of the governmental and expert response to the pandemic had been envisioned and planned for in advance. Moreover, many of these plans were implemented in the early stages of the pandemic. As authorities responded to the crisis, they relied on an already-formulated set of concepts and tools that had been devised for managing a future emergency. These pre-existing tools enabled officials to make sense of the event and to rapidly implement policies in response. But they also led to significant blind spots.
This book asks: under what circumstances were these planning tools developed? What did they enable experts, officials, and the public to see, and what did they hide from view? And, finally, as we assess the failures in our response to the pandemic and attempt to prepare for the next one, to what extent should we take for granted the capacity of these tools to guide future interventions effectively?
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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