Nick Bingham

Securing Life: The Emerging Practices of Biosecurity

In this paper we review recent social science work on the issue of biosecurity and suggest ways in which geographers and social scientists can approach and intervene in current biosecurity practices. Our argument is that it is both useful and necessary to locate and intervene at sites where the ordering of biomatters is open to doubt and/or contestation. We pitch discourses of biological immanence and emergence against forms of social science thinking which tend to trace overarching logics or seemingly unstoppable forces in matters of power and politics. While acknowledging the import of both literatures, our aim is to engage with the fraught empirical practicalities of making biomatters secure in order to bring to the fore the ways in which life matters are patterned by any number of processes and the ways in which these patterns are always conditional on sociomaterial contingencies.

Bees, butterflies, and bacteria: biotechnology and the politics of nonhuman friendship

The author seeks to decentre some already familiar geographies of biotechnology. By asking, with respect to genetically modified (GM) crops, not ‘what is the new?’, but ‘where is the new?’, the intention is to redirect attention (at least briefly) away from the GM technique or genetically modified object and its supposed properties, to the world to which that technique or object is being added. This in turn allows the question concerning GM to be approached from new directions, for example, via the routes taken into the controversy by three specific organisms. Not fully taken into account in the calculations of the biotechnology industry, the honey bee, the Monarch butterfly, and the bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis have all, in very different ways, made their presence felt as they literally and metaphorically encountered GM. In an attempt to do justice to these marginalised lifeforms, the forms of life of which they are part, and the biopolitical questions which they raise, the works of Jacques Derrida on friendship and animality, Jean-Luc Nancy on being with, and Bruno Latour on making things public, are brought into conversation. It is suggested that together what they offer is a way of thinking ourselves as collectively in the midst of things.

The Digital Generation?: Children, ICT and the Everyday Nature of Social Exclusion

In this paper we explore the potentially inclusionary and exclusionary implications of Information Communication Technologies (ICT) for children through an examination of ICT policies and practices within UK schools. We begin by outlining the rhetoric of inclusion evident in UK government policy and by reflecting on how these discourses are mobilised in three case-study schools. We go on to consider issues of social exclusion, demonstrating that both material and social factors can prevent access to appropriate computer technology. In particular, we emphasise the importance of the way that children negotiate the meanings and use of computers through their everyday practices within the classroom. The paper concludes by arguing that only when we recognise that children’s use of computers is about not only the broad-scale distribution of resources but also children’s everyday social relations can we hope to institute policies that promote an inclusive ‘information society’.

Where Do You Want to Go Tomorrow? Connecting Children and the Internet

In the late 1990s, use of either of the words ‘childhood’ or ‘internet’ is enough to signify at a stroke many of societys contemporary hopes and fears about what it means to be modern. By providing a critical review of the burgeoning (popular, policy, and academic) literature that is emerging as debates about ‘childhood’ and ‘the Internet’ take centre stage in the ongoing struggle to define the future of our ‘virtual geographies’, what we seek to do in this paper is to unpack some of the assumptions that underpin both terms. Specifically, we argue that there is now a dominant story in circulation concerning what has been called the rise of a ‘digital generation’, albeit one, as we show, that can be read in two diametrically opposed ways. In the central part of the paper, by characterising the Internet as the latest in a long line of ‘frontier’ technologies, we identify three senses (in terms of time, in terms of space, and in terms of competence) in which this dominant story acts to construct discursively the cyberspace opened up by computer-mediated communication as distinct from the ‘here and now’ . For all its seductiveness, however, we propose that this discourse is not adequate to describe the complexities of what particular children might actually do with particular Internet-based tools in particular settings. By drawing on a variety of work (from both within and outside of the discipline) which has begun to open up the undifferentiated categories ‘children’ and ‘technology’ on which simplistic notions of a cohort of ‘cyberkids’ are based, we conclude the paper with some preliminary ideas about how we might be able to offer more nuanced accounts of being connected.

Pathological Lives: Disease, Space and Biopolitics

Pandemics, epidemics and food borne diseases have, for some at least, become key challenges for contemporary global society. They threaten progress in global health, compromise food security, and, along with climate change and global terrorism, seem to usher in a state of emergency and a radically uncertain future. The central claim of Pathological Lives is that any solution offered to these kinds of emerging and often communicable diseases requires a broad–based geographical scrutiny. The book marks an empirically and theoretically informed contribution to a world seemingly under constant microbiological threat, drawing together and extending empirically based geographical scholarship in human–environment relations, science and society, more than human geographies and spatial theory to understand and evaluate efforts at making life more secure. The focus is on the food and farming sector, where the generation and subsequent transmission of disease can reach pandemic proportions. The authors review current approaches to biosecurity or making life safe within those sectors, analyse underlying drivers and logics to existing programmes and ask whether the resulting solutions can succeed. They follow farmers, retailers and regulators, amongst others, asking how pathological lives can be successfully regulated without making life more dangerous as a result.

Book Review: Digital places: living with geographic information technologies:

differential access. The essay expands a useful story of coping strategies while unpacking the notions of both women and open space to look at different groups of women and different designs of open space. Meanwhile Leavitt, Lingafelter and Morello take us through an auto-photographic project getting young girls to record their own poor Los Angeles neighbourhood, and its microgeographies of play and deprivation. Taking a rather different space, Longhurst looks at the supposedly feminized space of the shopping centre, but in terms of the pregnant female body. In one sense unsurprisingly, this unravels the relationship of a sexualized, marketed femininity and its exclusion of the reality of many women’s lives. On the other hand, as the essay suggests, the relationship of pregnancy and motherhood is rather more problematically situated in regards to both sexuality, gendered behaviour and consumption. Skelton’s essay, around sexually forceful female ragga artists from Jamaica, unpicks the relationship of place and sexuality in a different direction showing their performances as trebly coded by places – by the space of performance, by the urban ghetto and by Jamaica. The different ways these different places interact with sexuality and audience reaction makes a fascinating account mapping out some sexual empowerment, some containment and the sexual inequalities within the ghetto. This collection offers much thought-provoking material that, as the chapter by Boys suggests, gets us beyond ‘reading’ urban space, beyond a simple metaphorical model where architecture stands for social organization, and into the actual uses of different spaces. The collection usefully emphasizes how different places are inhabited and the differences places make to inhabitants. The overall connection of identity politics with geography develops an important issue, and the chapters offer new perspectives that more carefully disentangle the links between spaces physical and imagined, embodied practices, and the performance of gender.

Practices of attention, possibilities for care: Making situations matter in food safety inspection:

In this article the authors explore how attention and care are related in practice, as encountered in their ethnographic fieldwork on food safety inspection in the UK. Noting that there is a tendency to conceptually conflate the two activities within recent literatures, the authors tease apart the attention and care of inspection to propose that attention offers the conditions of possibility for care, and that its quality can shape that care in significant ways. Attention in this account does not involve simply a visual culture of surveillance, but includes the diverse range of sensory, bodily engagements through which the situations of animal and food production are made to matter. The study explores how three aspects of this version of attention – ecological, economical and educational – interact at a moment of significant regulatory change to leave key methods of supporting and improving the situations of food businesses vulnerable and difficult to sustain. The article concludes by reflecting on the general and specific implications of this way of thinking about attention for how care in policy practice is understood, valued and protected.