Suchergebnisse

In Snapshots from Home, Karin Fierke calls for radically repositioning the apparatus through which we interpret the world, inviting us to bridge the seemingly insurmountable chasm between quantum science and ancient Asian thought and practice to think about a more Global International Relations. Specifically, we are daringly tasked to consider how the 'weird' mathematics of quantum physics and science is paralleled by deeply relational ancient non-Western systems of knowledge. Fierke's starting point is Bohr's wholistic quantum physics but her main interest and focus is a deep reflection on its broad similarities with Buddhism, Hinduism and Daoism. Considering the parallels Fierke draws between the relational frames of quantum science and Daoism in the context of a raving pandemic, I feel challenged to bring the body into the conversation. How does Fierke's apparatus prompt us to think and act ethically in relation to the emerging postgenomic body arising from recent advances in microbiology including quantum microbiology ? It is a permeable body that is deeply quantum entangled in and with the natural and social-cultural environment and/or context. What can we learn from the relational strategies and actions attached to the Daoist body to thinking about the contemporary quantized bodies and the governance of their health?

Abstract
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.

This essay argues for the need for research into multispecies relations at the intersection between international political economy, ecology, and disease emergence. It draws attention to the conditions of intensive agribusiness and modern livestock, which alter human-animal-microbe relations, facilitating the emergence of infectious diseases such as the case of mink farms and COVID-19. It also highlights the impact of infection on animals and farming economies. Through a discussion of the ways anthropogenic activities have historically changed the kinds, scale, and spread of human disease, the essay concludes with an appeal to rethink international political economy.

This essay argues for the need for research into multispecies relations at the intersection between international political economy, ecology, and disease emergence. It draws attention to the conditions of intensive agribusiness and modern livestock, which alter human-animal-microbe relations, facilitating the emergence of infectious diseases such as the case of mink farms and COVID-19. It also highlights the impact of infection on animals and farming economies. Through a discussion of the ways anthropogenic activities have historically changed the kinds, scale, and spread of human disease, the essay concludes with an appeal to rethink international political economy.

AbstractHow 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Abstract
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.

Critical Security Methods offers a new approach to research methods in critical security studies. It argues that methods are not simply tools to bridge the gap between security theory and security practice. Rather, to practise methods critically means engaging in a more free and experimental interplay between theory, methods and practice. This recognises that the security practices we research are often methods in their own right, as forms of surveillance, data mining, visualisation, and so on, and that our own research methods are themselves practices that intervene and int.

Critical security studies (CSS) is now an established fi eld of scholarship. Central to CSS is the shared assumption that security threats and insecurities are not simply objects to be studied or problems to be solved, but the product of social and political practices. CSS aims to understand how those practices work and their social and political implications.

Critical Security Methods offers a new approach to research methods in critical security studies. It argues that methods are not simply tools to bridge the gap between security theory and security practice. Rather, to practise methods critically means engaging in a more free and experimental interplay between theory, methods and practice. This recognises that the security practices we research are often methods in their own right, as forms of surveillance, data mining, visualisation, and so on, and that our own research methods are themselves practices that intervene and interfere in those sit