Biosecurity in practice: the prevention of Dengue and its vector species in Europe as a field of biomedical, technological and political intervention

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Meike Wolf
• Subject Area: Social and Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology
• Term: from 2016 to 2019
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 315069504

Due to transnational travel and trade as well as climate changes 12.000 invasive alien species nowadays have been introduced to natural environments in Europe. Among them vector species such as the Aedes albopictus mosquito are believed to pose a threat to European citizens: the mosquitoes are capable of transmitting the Dengue-virus, causing a formerly tropical fever which has become endemic in more than 100 countries worldwide. Even if Europe does not (yet) rank as an area at risk for Dengue, the presence of the Aedes mosquitoes is now problematised as a biosecurity threat. Transnational attempts to regulate the complex interspecies relation between humans, mosquitoes and the Dengue-virus rest upon the assumption that the presence of Aedes albopictus does not necessarily result in an infection of the human population, but that it constitutes an essential prerequisite for Dengue-infections. Against this backdrop, the project aims to understand how the emergence of infectious disease risks as they are triggered by the unwanted mobility of biological organisms brings about the outset of biopolitical spaces of action. These act as the domain in which heterogeneous practices, technologies and standards meet and mingle. They aim to prevent the spread and local establishment of the Dengue virus in Europe. Thus, the entanglement of humans,viruses, and mosquitoes co-produces surveillance programmes, maps, public awareness campaigns and trade regulations as they are outlined in European guidelines for the surveillance of invasive mosquitoes. These shifting fields of political, medical, ecological and social intervention are the central object of inquiry. The project employs qualitative ethnographic methods. It aims to understand how preventive technologies are enacted in four exemplary settings (the design of surveillance programmes, control of used tyre trade, mosquito collection strategies, and community participation programmes), how they are adapted to local contexts and how they are made effective through specific sociotechnical arrangements. It will be analysed 1. how emerging preventive practices and technologies rely on and make productive use of the differentiation between native and invasive species, 2. how EU-geopolitical border regimes are thereby (re-)organised, transgressed, enforced, modified or questioned, 3. and how the relation between prevention, disease and space is rearranged under these circumstances. The project is based upon the assumption that infectious diseases as biocultural phenomena are contingent on specific historical, political, social and economic conditions. A cultural-anthropological analysis might therefore provide important insights into the heterogeneous ways that EU-geopolitical borders are transgressed, enforced, modified or (re-)organised through the management of emerging infectious diseases.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants