Sensing Salmonella: The Hybrid Politics of Disease Outbreaks and Food Security

• In Event: Sensing Security: Sensing and the Making of Transnational Security Infrastructures - I

Abstract

This contribution investigates how emerging sensing infrastructures in disease surveillance are entangled with the politics of food security. It addresses how food security politics—the closing of factories and bans of foodstuffs—is intertwined with infrastructures for sensing disease outbreaks, such as food tracing or genetic sequencing. Drawing on fieldwork at the European Centre for Disease Control and Surveillance, the paper shows how an outbreak of Salmonella is enacted in different manners with two different sensing infrastructures, and how these different enactments lead to tensions in the international politics of food security. In doing this, it highlights how different sensing infrastructures have large implications for the politics of food security, leading to conflicts in international food security. How do new sensing infrastructures fit into existing practices of food security? How do governmental and supranational organizations negotiate the hybrid politics of food security?
Theoretically, the chapter draws on actor-network theory sensibilities and treats disease outbreaks as risk objects that are enacted in hybrid collectifs (Hilgartner 1992; Callon & Law 1995). Concretely, the chapter analyzes how a recent outbreak of Salmonella in Europe is simultaneously enacted in one way with one infrastructure. The chapter analyzes how actors struggle to reconcile these differences in sensing: Is there a pan-European Salmonella outbreak, or are there only a few cases in London and Berlin? These struggles are tied to the ontological politics of food security.

Author

• Francis Lee, Uppsala University