Microbial Resolution - Kim, Gloria Chan-Sook

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Résumé :
Why the global health project to avert emerging microbes continually fails In 1989, a group of U.S. government scientists met to discuss some surprising findings: new diseases were appearing around the world, and viruses that they thought long vanquished were resurfacing. Their appearance heralded a future perpetually threatened by unforeseeable biological risks, sparking a new concept of disease: the emerging microbe. With the Cold War nearing its end, American scientists and security experts turned to confront this new enemy, redirecting national security against its risky horizons. In order to be fought, emerging microbes first needed to be made perceptible...

Biographie:
Contents Preface Introduction: Microbial Resolution Part I. Aesthetics of Uncertainty 1. Pathogenic Nation Making 2. Materializing Emerging Microbes Part II. The Calculative Imaginary 3. Flightlines and Sightlines 4. Fluid Economies of Biosecurity 5. Managing the Microbial Frontier Acknowledgments Notes Index ...

Sommaire:
but how could something immaterial, unknowable, and ever mutating be coaxed into visibility, knowability, and operability? Microbial Resolution charts the U.S.-led war on the emerging microbe to show how their uncertain futures were transformed into objects of global science and security. Moving beyond familiar accounts that link scientific knowledge production to optical practices of visualizing the invisible, Gloria Chan-Sook Kim develops a theory of microbial resolution to analyze the complex problematic that arises when dealing with these entities: what can be seen when there is nothing to see? Through a syncretic analysis of data mining, animal-tracking technologies, media networks, computer-modeled futures, and global ecologies and infrastructures, she shows how a visual impasse-the impossibility of seeing microbial futures-forms the basis for new modes of perceiving, knowing, and governing in the present. Timely and thought provoking, Microbial Resolution opens up the rich paradoxes, irreconcilabilities, and failures inherent in this project and demonstrates how these tensions profoundly animate twenty-first-century epistemologies, aesthetics, affects, and ecologies. --...