Abstract

TIRADO, Francisco  and  CANADA, José A.. Epidemics: a new socio-technical object. Convergencia [online]. 2011, vol.18, n.56, pp.133-156. ISSN 2448-5799.

Recently, epidemics have become an important concern in social sciences. They currently have two important ways of conceptualizing epidemics: a) as a panic object; or b) as a bio-political situation. Nevertheless, these two perspectives disregard that epidemics basically are a way of transforming our daily life. In order to grasp this impact we put forward to conceptualize epidemics as a socio-technical object. Our paper will show this perspective. Analyzing mass media, information from academic journals, such as Science, or from Health Institutions we will explain how epidemics change the main borders of our everyday life. That is, the tension between animal-human, local-global, politics-nature and healthy-pathological. We will argue that after the aforementioned rupture appears a new redefinition of said limits with the following elements: a) medicine appears as the most relevant dimension in that redefinition; b) it is defined a kind of "biological emergency" as the way to understand the aforementioned process of redefinition; and c) a specific body regime is updated.

Keywords : epidemics; influenza; daily life; biological emergency; body regime.

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