The role of citizenship as Early Warning Systems. Answers to this question.

Two post ago, I wrote about some topics we want to inquire in relation with our current research goal, that is, what would be the role of citizenship as Early Warning System, or, generally, in the biosurveillance realm. 

Through ResearchGate, two researches have contributed with their answers to this issue. Responses are quite interesting:

"Enrique,

Thanks for your excellent job of posing this question, and articulating many critical issues.  I will be following the discussion that I hope will ensue, and perhaps make some more comments of my own after seeing where the discussion goes.  It seems to me that this whole area has been inadequately defined and standardized.  I consider much of my work to be biosurveillance - looking for prevalence and distribution of pathogens in natural environments, primarily through the use of  sentinel organisms.  However, surveillance or biomonitoring (which term is best?) for vector  populations is also important.  I've attached a couple of relevant papers.  Best wishes, Bruce"

"Hi Enrique,

As you mentioned, the term ‚biosurveillance‘ is closely related to the term ‘bio-monitoring’, in which monitoring is less regular than one would expet it to be in a surveillance system. Originally, these terms were coined about 40 years ago, when environmental concerns grew because of the ever occurring industrial pollution. Standard books of the matter should give you an overview about the terms applied.

Are there tools where the citizen can contribute?

Usually, every citizen can forward his/her concern to the appropriate parties, the national or international bodies concerned with the issue. In the U.S. this is certainly the EPA.

A sentinel site is a reference site being used usually on a national base. Look at what the tropical docs say about sentinel sites for their research:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Society_of_Travel_Medicine

wish you all the best with your endeavor,

good luck!"

In fact, I am very interested in the International Society of Travel Medicine work, as well as the kind of stuff that the Global Oubreak Alert and Response Network (GOARN) is carrying out (I didn't know this site), and I am sure we can slide for this websites in order to know new things and to collect new material and documents. 

In any case, we need for information about it, so we hope you would like to help us with your point of view or source of information.

By our part, we are wondering if it is feasible that one role of citizenship within biosurveillance may be alert global institutions when he/she or a relative present unusual symptoms, uploading it to the web through a smartphone or pc; simply pressing a button... not only seeking help, but to act as a Early System for a potential outbreak for which is necessary take actions previously within the Preparedness logic of government.

Photo Credit: Flickr, User New York National Guard

Welcome to our webpage!

First, I want to thank everyone who yesterday participated in the question I posed in ResearchGate, I hope more people participate and help to enrich de discussion, I am sure your answers would like everybody, particularly to our research group. 

The post of today is about one issue we was talking the last week. Is about one project we had in mind since the last spring, but for several reasons, we cannot take it off till this week. This project is the construction of a webpage where we can upload our works, reflections, and thus, release our field of knowledge but everyone interested in it.

Although the website is still under construction, you can visit it here and take a look to the main sections and if you want, give us some feedback about it. His name is "Portraits of Bios in the 21th Century-POBI21" (the name is also provisional), and we want to build some forums of discussion about biosurveillance and anthropology, social implications of this realm of the science and technology...

Thumbnail of POBI21

Webpage is organized in six sections: home, about, team, documents, our researches and events. Home is only the greeting and the ways of contact with us (Facebook and Twitter will be available soon). About is the section where we present our aim and our theoretical framework. Then, in team, you can check our personal bios as well as log in to our Academia.edu profiles. The main section is documents, splitted in Publications (papers and other academic outcomes), Working Papers (what are we doing now) and Seminary Summaries (some abstracts about our open seminaries). Our researches is still under construction, but soon you will find the topics we are working and other stuff. Finally, in events, you will see the next congress, meetings, seminaries, etc. where you can find some about our work.

The website is also created in order to link other research groups interested in our topics, and to enlarge the contacts for a later collaborations with people of worldwide. 

We will be publish several events where we will participate (not necessarily organized by us) and the meetings with public assistance (as seminaries where we will read some papers or books). We will be refreshing this section periodically, so I recommend checking it regularly!

This is the webpage: Portraits of Bios in the 21th Century

Photo Credit: Personal photo

Epidemics and Biosurveillance - Some questions to answer

After the "break" of Christmas, my research group and me are collecting new material in order to publish news papers and a book named "Biopolitics and Biosecurity at the 21th Century", in partnership with a brazilian research group, head by Cleci Maraschin.

In order to do that, we have to clear up some questions that I want to share with all of you, and so, you can collaborate and we can build a discussion exchanging diverses points of view. Here are the questions:

• What is understood, exactly, by biosurveillance?

• What is understood, in terms of biosecurity and biosurveillance, by Early Warning Systems?

• From the point of view of biosurveillance, scientifics and experts, what is currently the role of citizenship? 

• There are tools, apps, guidelines, etc. whereby citizenship can collaborate or "enact" as alert system?

• Where can we find documentation about this kind of issues? 

• What  is a sentinel site or a sentinel web? and how it works?

• What is the role of Internet into this new intelligence related with detecting pandemics and acting before it occurs?

Finally, I want to share with you our webpage (still is under construction), where we will upload our materials and papers in order to shere it with all of you, thanks a lot!

Portraits of Bios in the 21th Century

Photo Credit: Flickr, user Temari 09

New virtual discussion: The use of Grounded Theory in qualitative research

In the current post I want to write about one new discussion emerged in ResearchGate (a social net where people with academic works can publish and share their papers and other kind of stuff and discuss whatever topic). The theme of this discussion is about the use of Grounded Theory and Case Study, their differences and utilities in qualitative research. 

As usually I have done, I offer here the transcription of the discussion, particularlly the central question and my answer, but you can consult the full discussion with several interesting answers here:

Key question:

"What's the difference between case study and grounded theory research? Does it make sense to use both?

Does one only use one research strategy or several? Is it possible/recommendable to use both GT and case study research for triangulation purposes? where is the difference??"

And my anwers was: 

"For me, Case Study and Grounded Theory are distint but compatible. That's to say, Case Study is the study of one phenomenon deeply, througout several ways (i.e) if you are studying gender discrimination, a case study is to gather empirical material from interviews, documents, ethnography... and thus, to know the gender discrimination.

About Grounded Theory, is a process of research "backwards" than usual, that's to say, tipically a research starts with an hipotesis and theories, and then you collect material in order to confirm (or not) this theories. Grounded theory works beginning from the data collect and ends with the theories, at the basis of the empirical data 

If you want, in my blog I have a post talking about Study Case and another way to "channel" the empirical material which differs from Grounded Theory, called "Thick Description", it can serve for your investigation better than Grounded Theory, I guess.

This is the link: http://ebaes.blogspot.com.es/2014/12/methodology-in-social-studies-of.html"

Although in my research group, we don't use Grounded Theory currently, is a very interesting methodology in order to "assemble" the discourse or the "product" of the empirical data' interpretation. I am sure if you read some answer in the discussion, you can make sense about his use. What do you think about Grounded Theory? Do you know any alternative to Grounded Theory or Study Case? Do you use this methodologies in different forms? You can join the discussion or we can talk here.

Photo Credit: Flickr, user Sam Ladner

Second communications for the UAB Congress

In the last post I was talking about the congress where our crew are going to present two communications. I want to remember the Congress is titled Affection, Body and Politics and you can still register in order to assist as a hearer. In that post, I named one of the communications we are going to carry out, particularly the one I am the speaker related with a new conception of body different to the Foucaultian’ conception and intimately linked with the new outbreaks and pandemics.

Actualliy, Stephen Hawking advised it with his popular quote "For millions of years, mankind lived just like the animals. Then something happened which unleashed the power of our imagination. We learned to talk "

The current post is going to be about the second one communication we are going to release, this one will be presented by my mate and friend, Marco Maureira and, although the research line is the same as the last one, Marco will resume Focault to point out some ideas about body, bios, and technology.

In fact, this communication is called “We Always were Cyborg, re-thinking life/re-thinking corporeality”. I cannot facilitate slides as the last time I have done, but I want to try give some main ideas of this work:

Beginning with some quick and brief concepts of our most remotely anthropology, we want to problematize the idea that Cyborg, as we understand it in the daily life, is a mistaken conception. This is because the cyborg-body doesn’t begin at the middle of XX Century, when humankind invented computers, DNAs intervention, bionics, etc. but we always were cyborg is to say that techné, as Agamben or Haraway explains, was always with us, defining how and who we are.

Then, we will offer some points that support this theory, basing on anthropological studies and the Heiddegerian theories, understanding language as one of this technés that have allowed people along History to begin (in the Deleuzian sense) all of that we are currently.

Do we are truly evolving? and, in this case, there is some historical and taken-for-granted conceptions we have to change about it?

Photo Credit: Flickr, user Charis Tsevis

New Congress in February!

After few days disconnected due to an important task I carried out for the Open University of Catalonia, I come back to Anthropology of the Bios talking about the 2^nd Congress of Critical Social Psychology that will be held in Barcelona, from February 12^th to February 14^th. This congress is titled “Affect, Embodiment and Politics” (registration is still open for everyone), where my research group will expose two communications about our current line of research.

For this, the current post is about one of this communications, particularly the one I will espose, whose name is “The new Management of Biorisk and the Biopower’ shift: from the Institutionalized body to the Interspecie Body”. Although the communication will be in Spanish, you can check the Prezi’ slides I am going to use here

For this work, we will begin talking about the current situation of our society in several realms: technology, society, outbreaks… whose assemblage is so different from that pointed out by Foucault in the 80’s which he never could observer because his death. After this introduction we will present two new concepts: interspecies-body and cinepolitics (I wrote one post talking about cinepolitics). Both interspecies-body and cinepolitics are linked at the basis of this new techno-scientific panorama drawn in the first part, where when a new outbreak is emerged, management and surveillance are carried out over the movement of a plural or heterogeneous body made by the union of animals, bacteria, viruses and humans. Is so difficult cutting of the link between all of them, and is observed that peril or risk is no longer one animal (a sheep or a flock of sheep for instance) but the jump to the human or to a whole farm (cows, horses, pigs…).

The next step in our communication is to compare this conception with the Foucaultian view of body: let live-make die to make live-let die, and his conception of a close and finalized body, passing from institution (school, jail, madhouse…) to institution. To finish, we will show some examples extracted from several European documents, including images and some text (you can check it in the last slides.

What is your opinion about that? We need some people in order to discuss our research and enrich our empirical material. 

Photo Credit: Flickr, user Castgen

Pandemics, Bioterrorism and International Security

The post of today is about one discussion carried out yesterday in the LinkedIn group called "Pandemics, Bioterrorism and International Security", where Ruth Mclure has sent me several and useful information about maps in the way we are researching currently.

The origin of this topic is one new appeared in Yahoo.com where is alerted about 15 children died due to the new strain of flu (H3N2) (you can read it here: http://yhoo.it/14mQcq8), and it is explained how each case is reported and how they are "counted" in order to stablish the boundary of a epidemics.

The sequence of the discussion' post can be read here http://linkd.in/1BHdFx0 but I am go to copy it here:

Me: "So interesenting new. But I have a "naïf" question that I'm sure you can answer: how are counted the cases and what is the procedure in order to report new cases in this kind of outbreak?? There is some kind of biosurveillance? and, in this case... how it works? 

Thanks in advanced."

Ruth Mclure: "Hi Enrique, you live in Spain, so things may be different there than here in the USA. 

When the Physicians or other Health practitioners Diagnose this Influenza Virus in Children and in Adults, forms are made out and forward to their local Health Departments for Case Counting and then those Cases are then forward to the State Health Departments, then the State Health Departments, Shares that information to the CDC (Communicable Disease Center) that is located in Atlanta, Georgia. There use to be Formal Cards made out with Patient Data on them, so the data of certain needed information on these patients actually will be counted as a case. One Person is equal to a case of Flu. Local Health Departments have an Epidemiology Department where these workers go into the fields, and do various functions on a broad base of Different Diseases, and keeps tallies (counts) on many of the Infectious Diseases. The Field Epidemiologists on the ground in South Africa are doing the same thing with Case finding, but with the Flu, these cases are all ready diagnosed, so you have the REPORTING side of this Flu Season. 

There are two different links that I will give to you, and I will give to you the first one that takes you over the the Flu Section of the CDC on the Internet Web. 

Here is the first Link of the Flu Department/Section on the Flu in CDC 

Title of the Link is Influenza (Flu) 

htp://www.cdc.gov/flu/index.htm 

if this above does not go through then just put this in your Search Bar cdc.gov/flu to see if you will be taken over to that Flu Site, or a page that will give you information about the present Flu. 

The next title is Situation Summary on Influenza A (H3N2) Variant Viruses ("H3N2v") 

Again if my Link below does not take you over than put the title of this Section into your Search Bar 

htp://www.cdc.gov/flu/swineflu/h3n2v-situation.htm 

or just put in cdc.gov/flu/swineflu "

Me: "Highly interesting what you say, Ruth. Thanks a lot, tomorrow I'll check the links you've posted. 

I have asked it because in my research group we are finding out how current maps of diseases with arrows and illustrated vectors between countries are built. Here in Europe (at least in Spain) we cannot find epidemiological stations as you said or sentinel sites... and this is tough in relation with the ebola outbreak, for instance."

Ruth Mclure: "Enrique, you may find this Link, if it will go through, something that might work for you in your Research Class.

http://apps.who.int/ithmap/

That map has never diseases on it. I do not have the name of he map.

Check to see if the link will go through."

The last question I have is how "risk" is defined in this map, a term that I guess is defined similarly by other epidemics experts and physicians. But if you have some to say or a definition of risk, your contribution will be welcome!

Finally, I want to thank to Ruth Mclure their explanations and contributions. She is a writer and editor about several topics, including epidemics and outbreaks.

Photo Credit: Flickr, user Stéfan.

Two new papers published!

As I post about two weeks ago, we were notified two of our papers would be published. Today has been published the second one so the post of today is where I gather both in order to everyone can consult it:

The first is titled "Cosmopolítica y Biopolítica en los regímenes de bioseguridad en la Unión Europea" published in the Chilean review "Pléyade", here is the abstract:

"In the last decade the notion of biosecurity has become really relevant in Social

Sciences. These have showed that the concept implies a new approach about the

phenomenon of security. Nevertheless, in this paper we will argue that biosecurity

means something else: it is a completely reconceptualization of the very idea of bios.

On the basis of several documents and proposals of European Union plus some

interviews to experts in the topic, we will put forward that European Union regimes

of biosecurity are a problematization, in the sense established by Michel Foucault,

of life. That is, they open a space in that this enters in the play of truth and false.

Moreover, we will pose that this problematization supposes a particular exercise.

One in that it is shaped at the same time a cosmopolitical and biopolitical proposal.

That is to say, regimes of biosecurity produce a cosmos fold over the living that is a

project of management of life as well. We will argue that the main elements of both has

to do with a new conceptualitation of living as living-together, as something mobile,

threaten, disperse over several scales and trap in strictly structures of codification."

You can consult it here: http://www.caip.cl/wp-content/uploads/14-Tirado-et.-al..pdf

The second one is titled "Subjetividad y subjetivadores en las tecnologías de bioseguridad en la Unión Europea" and was published 10 days ago in the Brazilian review "Polis e Psique", which abstract is here:

This paper analyses the relation between biosecurity and subjectivity. For this, we don’t follow

the narrative and discursive approaches or the poststructuralism that insists in conceptualizing

subject as a fold of external elements. Instead, we resort to actor-network concepts. In

this vein, we put forward the concept of “subjectifiers”, an element that offers the possibility

of a connexion with a reflective effect, and the notion of “scene”, an element defined by having

an affect attached to it. We analyse a case study: technologies of biosecurity in European

Union. We pose that it is possible to describe three subjectifiers (living-together, detachment

and future projection) and a scene characterized by threat as key elements in order to understand

the relation between biosecurity and subjectivity. Panic or threat are not elements inside

our mind or out there. On the contrary, they are dispositions activated when we establish connexions

with the subjectifiers and scenes.

And you can also consult it here: http://seer.ufrgs.br/index.php/PolisePsique/article/view/44868/pdf_26

I recommend not only to take a look to our papers, but check all of them because there are so interesting. In the Chilean review, you will find a monographic about cosmopolitics, whilts in the Brazilian review you will find a spacial number about subjectivity and other issues.

As always, I hope you like it and you can do some comments in order to connect us and share our knowledges!

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year full of new researches for everyone!

Photo Credit: Flickr, user Dayna Bateman.