Viral Becomings:From Mechanical Viruses to Viral (Dis)Entanglements in Preventing Global Disease

This paper explores the contribution of an ethos of (dis)entanglement arising from quantum thought to interpreting and (re)acting on the current global pandemic of Covid-19. The Covid-19 pandemic is giving rise to a world of pandemic separation, in which infection barriers such as masks, disinfection, social distancing, and isolation may be necessary in the immediate moment of avoiding sickness and death. However, these exclusionary and short-term response mechanisms do not address the larger question relating to global interspecies living, which in its current dynamic is increasingly giving rise to newly emerging infectious diseases such as Covid-19. The Covid-19 pandemic is showing that the health of human beings is deeply entangled with that of other species and places. However, it is also showing the limits to the mechanistic ontology driving modern public health thinking. I build on the work by political ecologists of health and biosocial scholars, especially Frost's concept of biocultural emergence and her engagement with ontological plurality in the human subject, to make the case for a different global politics of disease in preventing the emergence of infectious disease

Riding the Shi:from infection barriers to the microbial city

How can a microbial approach to global health security protect life? Contemporary infection control mechanisms set the human and the pathogenic microbe against each other, as the victim versus the menace. This biomedical polarization persistently runs through the contemporary dominant mode of thinking about public health and infectious disease governance. Taking its cue from the currently accepted germ theory of disease, such mechanisms render a global city like Hong Kong not only pervasively “on alert” and under threat of unpredictable and pathogenic viruses and other microbes, it also gives rise to a hygiene and antimicrobial politics that is never entirely able to control pathogenic circulation. The article draws on recent advances in medical microbiology, which depart from germ theory, to invoke an ecological understanding of the human-microbe relation. Here, while a small number of viruses are pathogenic, the majority are benign; some are even essential to human life. Disease is not just the outcome of a pathogenic microbe infecting a human host but emerges from socioeconomic relations, which exacerbate human-animal-microbial interactions. In a final step, the article draws on Daoist thought to reflect on the ways that such a microbial understanding translates into life and city dwelling

Human security assemblages in global politics: the materiality and instability of biopolitical governmentality in Thailand and Vietnam

This thesis investigates the implications of human security on global politics. While it adopts a Foucauldian analytics of governmentality and biopolitics, the thesis differs from biopolitical accounts of human security. These accounts tend to reduce human security to a coherent, totalizing, and inadvertently successful mode of governance, deemphasizing its situatedness and instability. In contrast, by complementing the Foucauldian approach to the study of human security with a Deleuzian lens of machinic assemblage in which materiality is particularly emphasized, the thesis argues that the governmental logic of human security gives rise to a multiplicity of open-ended vernacular assemblages and associated orders of governance. Though these assemblages are particular, messy, contingent systems which vacillate, undermine themselves, clash and hybridize with surrounding assemblages, this does not render them ineffective. When the object of analysis is the global, a focus on the materiality of events helps to explore how the global is localized. A focus on materiality opens up the opportunity to explore how the local materializes. This interplay between localizations and materializations disrupts the logics that underlie governmental processes. In this way, the thesis demonstrates how the intransigence of life constantly escapes and readjusts the biopolitical imperative. Empirically, the thesis traces the way human security materializes as a situated governmental strategy in emerging assemblages for managing pathogenic and illicit circulations relating to global migrant communities in Thailand and Vietnam. It shows the way the intricate and productive as well as destructive interplay of human and nonhuman elements inherent to the assemblages helped to constitute two vernacular orders of human security and associated political subjectivities

Ethics in a Quantum World

This forum invites a reflection on how we may understand ethics in global studies in light of the growing debate on thinking through quantum for the social sciences and humanities more broadly. Quantum principles such as entanglement and indeterminism challenge the notions of individuality and subjectivity and the validity of universal principles as sufficient guidelines for agency, all notions that constitute the foundations of modern deontological ethics. Science is not a separate sphere of society. Its concepts migrate across “disciplines” and end up constituting languages, accepted methodologies, and worldviews. The contributors to this special issue investigate how the shift from a Newtonian metaphysics to a quantum metaphysics may offer conceptual tools for transforming our understanding of causality, self and otherness, the human and the nonhuman, and how we may consequently live together in the world and act ethically in it

Managing pathogenic circulation: Human security and the migrant health assemblage in Thailand

Abstract This article traces the emergence of human security as a situated political strategy for managing the circulation of pathogens relating to Burmese migrant communities in Thailand. Specifically, it focuses on the intricate and productive interplay of a range of human and non-human elements that helped to bring forth and shape the vernacular micropolitics of human security. The article documents the techno-(bio)political mechanisms of the human security intervention in two of Thailand's provinces. By enframing, ordering and depoliticizing the complex health world of Burmese migrants in terms of simple dichotomies in which 'unruly' nature (pathogens, diseases, bodies) is contrasted with human techno-scientific ingenuity (scientific evidence, technological innovations, managerial effectiveness), these mechanisms render the circulation of pathogens amenable to biopolitical governance. It is here argued that in the struggle to manage pathogenic circulation, human security transforms the issue of migrant health into a technical matter concerned with the (self-)management of bodies and the governmentalization of the Thai state to the exclusion of important but difficult questions concerning a violent politics of exclusion