Riding the Shi
From Infection Barriers to the Microbial City
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 2236871 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Nadine Voelkner (0000-0002-4310-8025, University of Groningen, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2019 |
| Volume | 13 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 375-391 |
| Publication date | 2019-12-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | International Political Sociology (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1749-5679 • E-ISSN: 1749-5687 |
| DOI | 10.1093/ips/olz016 |
| PMID | 34191935 |
| OpenAlex | W2909574324 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 15 |
| References cited | 39 |
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
Biology · Disease · Environmental ethics · Environmental health · Germ theory of disease · Human animal · Human health · Infectious disease (medical specialty · Political science · Politics · Public health · Sociology · Body Image and Dysmorphia Studies · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Medicine · Zoonotic diseases and public health · Ecology · Law · Microbiology
Viral Becomings
Die Logik des Ausbruchs
The vice of biosecurity
The invisible city
On the relationships between Covid-19 and extended urbanization
Snapshot of a quantized body
Entanglements of Care and Contagion
On the medicalisation of global politics
Reimagining IR’s biomedical foundations
The “UFO Taboo” Is What IR Theorists Make of It
Is Covid-19 a dread risk? The death toll of the pandemic year 2020 in long-term and transnational perspective
From Objects of Expertise to Objects of Experience
Establishing the Health Governance of Flows
Lessons from the Viral Body Politic
Who Owns a Deadly Virus? Viral Sovereignty, Global Health Emergencies, and the Matrix of the International
Die Sars-Krise in Hongkong
The Epidemic Streets
New Materialism
How Forests Think
Geographies of Nature
Knowledge, moral claims and the exercise of power in global health
Modernity at large
A Treatise on Efficacy
Realist Social Theory
The Agency of Assemblages and the North American Blackout
Sounding the Limits of Life
The viral gene
Parasites, ghosts and mutualists
Hygienic Modernity
The Fragility of Things
A thousand plateaus
When pathogens determine the territory
Only human? A worldly approach to security
More than one world, more than one health
Global Health and International Relations
Vibrant Matter
| Unique citing works | 15 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 2,5 |
| Citation span | 2020 - 2025 (6) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 15 |