The Outbreak Narrative: Disease Emergence and the Obscured Geography of Poverty

Event: Seminar

Date: Thursday, 23 Feb 2012 15:30

Speaker(s): Priscilla Wald
Professor of English and Women's Studies, Duke University

Organised by: ESRC Genomics Policy and Research Forum & The Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities

Venue: Room S37 (2nd floor) Psychology Building, Edinburgh University, 7 George Square

Accounts of newly surfacing diseases appeared in scientific publications and the mainstream media in the West with increasing frequency following the introduction of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) in the mid-1980s.  They put the vocabulary of disease outbreaks into circulation, and they introduced the concept of "emerging infections."  While these accounts were neither monolithic, nor static, their repetition of particular phrases, images and story lines produced a formula that was amplified by the extended treatment of these themes in the popular novels and films that proliferated in the mid-1990s. Collectively, they drew out what was implicit in all of the accounts: a fascination not just with the novelty and danger of the microbes, but also with the changing social and spatial formations of a shrinking world.

These stories have consequences.  As they disseminate information, they affect survival rates and contagion routes.  They promote or mitigate the stigmatizing of individuals, groups, populations, spaces and locales (regional and global), behaviors and lifestyles, and they change economies. They also influence how both scientists and the lay public understand the nature and consequences of infection, how we imagine the threat and why we react so fearfully to some disease outbreaks and not others at least as dangerous and pressing, as well as which problems merit our attention and resources.

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All welcome. Attendance is free, but you are asked to register for this event .