Microbial Menaces: Calculating, Imagining, And Performing Potential Pandemic Futures

• In Event: Without Borders? The Future of Global Health and Transnational Humanitarianism

Abstract

This paper deals with technoscientific visions of a potential or not-yet future: that of an influenza pandemic. Pandemics are represented as a threat not only to health, but to economic and political wellbeing on a global scale. Pandemic fears are currently drawn into the sociotechnical domains of resilience planning, surveillance systems, and into globalised expert networks. Within these rationales, a state of risk is made the rule rather than the exception. Countries like the UK or Germany have adopted the need to prepare for future outbreak events by designing preparedness planning systems.
Following Ben Anderson’s (2010) attempt to systematise the logics of anticipatory action, the paper will analyse pandemic preparedness as a global health practice. In order to understand how the not-yet future of an influenza pandemic is made present and tangible, the paper first discusses how pandemic futures are calculated through specific spatio-temporal relationships. Second, the paper critically scrutinizes the construction of potential outbreak scenarios underlying pandemic preparedness and its impact on transnational humanitarianism. Third, it looks at the performance of a not-yet future through local emergency exercises. It will be argued that pandemic preparedness bridges spatial, technological and administrative gaps between globally circulating viruses and local areas of intervention, thereby enacting potential futures as a matter of local concern.
The paper is based upon ethnographic fieldwork among health professionals, resilience planners, and local authorities in London and Frankfurt; it combines a critical global health perspective with STS-informed insights into the socio-material contingencies of future-related expertise.

Author

• Meike Wolf, Goethe University Frankfurt