Communicating biosecurity

Shifting from risk-calculation orientations focusing on populations to preparedness perspectives that model uncertainty through scenario-based projections, biosecurity debates redefined notions of "health" and "security." Nevertheless, a key focus of biosecurity discussions--the domain labeled "communication"--has not been fundamentally rethought, even as it has expanded and professionalized. Bracketing preconceived ideas about the term's content, the article traces debates about biosecurity "communication" from the 1990s to the present, drawing on ethnography and textual analysis. Using a notion of biocommunicability, the cultural modeling of how discourse is produced, circulates, and is received, the article analyzes assumptions regarding subjects, subject-positions, objects, spatializing and temporalizing practices, scales, economies of affect, and regimes of ethics that are built into discourse about "communication." Ironically, the conviction that "communication" is of marginal importance as a focus of critical inquiry, seemingly shared by most medical anthropologists, enables these assumptions to fundamentally shape discussions of biosecurity and emergency management.