Sociology Research Seminar
Disrupting the circulation of viruses, challenging public health's role in global governance
24 September 2009, 12-2pm Menzies Building W10.10 Monash Clayton Campus (PSI Library)
Dr Niamh Stephenson
University of New South Wales
Abstract
Many of the threats facing global public health today take the form of emerging infectious diseases (EID). Epidemiologists attribute EID, in part, to the intensification of the 'free circulation' of commodities, people, expertise and capital transnationally. Public health responses to EID rarely try to interrupt this mobility of goods and information. Rather they extend the rationale of free circulation through efforts to intensify movement and communication between international agencies, national health (and defence) departments and the pharmaceutical industry. In this way public health adopts a role in extending (post)liberal modes of transnational regulation.
This paper examines one unfolding challenge to public health's reluctance to defy the ethos of international trade agreements. Indonesia has withdrawn from WHO's 'virus sharing' scheme. Indonesian samples of H5N1 sent to WHO have been used, not only to identify pathogens, but for the commercial development of potentially profitable vaccines. WHO, Indonesia claims, is acting outside of the Convention on Biological Diversity which states that those profiting from biological samples need to 'share benefits' with the states providing those samples. I examine how Indonesia's move both exposes public health's role in global governance and compels WHO to do more than acknowledge the massive North/South inequities of access to vaccines for EID. The paper considers both: how the international response continues to extend the role played by public health in the development of (post)liberal global governance; and asks if this disruption of free circulation constitutes an escape that will force the development of new modes of transnational regulation.
Dr Niamh Stephenson
Niamh Stephenson is a Senior Lecturer in Social Science at the University of New South Wales, and currently on sabbatical at BIOS, LSE and VELiM, University of Sydney. Her recent book, Escape Routes: Control and Subversion in the 21st Century, interrogates how postliberal regimes of control are impacting on the politics of experience in the fields of health, labour and migration (co-authored with Dimitris Papadopoulos and Vassilis Tsianos, Pluto Press). She is interested in the role of experience in socio-political change (as in Analysing Everyday Experience: Social Research and Political Change, Palgrave, co-authored with Dimitris Papadopoulos) and is currently researching how biopolitics unfolds without taking the population as its object.