This the final version. Available from Universidad autónoma del estado de México via the URL in this recordRecently, epidemics have become an important concern in social sciences. They
currently have two important ways of conceptualizing epidemics: a) as a panic object; or b)
as a bio-political situation. Nevertheless, these two perspectives disregard that epidemics
basically are a way of transforming our daily life. In order to grasp this impact we put
forward to conceptualize epidemics as a socio-technical object. Our paper will show this
perspective. Analyzing mass media, information from academic journals, such as Science,
or from Health Institutions we will explain how epidemics change the main borders of our
everyday life. That is, the tension between animal-human, local-global, politics-nature and
healthy-pathological. We will argue that after the aforementioned rupture appears a new
redefinition of said limits with the following elements: a) medicine appears as the most
relevant dimension in that redefinition; b) it is defined a kind of “biological emergency”
as the way to understand the aforementioned process of redefinition; and c) a specific body
regime is update
