Biosurveillance infrastructures of more-than-human life

Keywords: biosecurity; surveillance; political ecology; digital geographies; biocapital
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Saturday
Session Start / End Time: 2/26/2022 11:20 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/26/2022 12:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 1

Abstract

Biotechnology companies are surveilling more-than-human life at unprecedented scales. One of the first firms to detect COVID-19 as a possible pandemic was Toronto-based Blue Dot, which used big data sources such as airline ticket info and public health reports to flag a cluster of flu-like cases in Wuhan as a potential concern. Meanwhile other biotech companies are advancing metagenomic sequencing to test bodily fluids (urine, blood, cerebrospinal fluid) en masse to detect emerging infectious disease microbes like viruses, bacteria, and fungi. In this paper I use a political ecologies of data and health framework (Nost and Goldstein 2021) to understand the processes of abstraction that turn microbial and more-than-human life into data that can be analyzed, circulated, and consumed for biopolitical surveillance ends. Drawing on policy analysis, scientific research publications, and interviews with biotech and disease surveillance firms, I explore how forms of microbial life are not only infrastructural in and of themselves, but are also being made into disease surveillance data infrastructure that manages and (re)produces some human life. I discuss the implications of this infrastructure-in-the-making for anticipatory temporalities of biosecurity; racialized logics of valued life; and dichotomous constructions of human and non-human beings.