CONFERENCE: Health, Governance and the Global

"Health, Governance, and the Global: Cultural Histories and Contemporary Practices"

A one-day international workshop held at the University of Warwick
under the joint auspices of GARNET / Centre for the Study of Globalisation and Regionalisation
and
Centre for the History of Medicine

March 9, 2007

Participants include:

Virginia Berridge, London School of Hygeine and Tropical Medicine

Julie Kent, University of West England
Naomi Pfeffer, London Metropolitan University
Sarah Hodges, Unversity of Warwick
Mohan Rao, Jawaharlal Nehru University
Sunil Amrith, Birkbeck College, London
Sophie Harman, University of Manchester

For further information please contact Dr. Sarah Hodges: S.Hodges@warwick.ac.uk

Welcome to Biotrash!

Welcome to the Biotrash blog. Biotrash is a new research project directed by Dr. Sarah Hodges, of the Centre for the History of Medicine at the University of Warwick. The project traces the contemporary cultural history of the global traffic in medical waste in a postgenomic age.

Our intention is for this blog to develop into an online research resource for the -project. Here we'll be discussing our findings, posting links to news stories and academic articles relating to the global governance of biotrash, and inviting comment from colleagues and fellow researchers. Over the next few weeks, we'll be working at compiling a detailed list of links to the most useful websites dealing with the international politics of medical garbage.

Increasingly, the ‘global’ has become an ever-more regularly invoked term—both in popular anxieties about health (such as SARS or Avian ‘flu) as well as in the world of public policy.
What has been less clear, however, is what exactly the object of governance is in the ‘global governance of health’. Is it a set of regulations? Is it bodily practices (including, for example, migration) of individuals or groups? Or, is it the bio-health phenomena themselves (such as pathogens, vectors or therapeutics)? And what is the relationship in the global governance of health between the governance of commerce, on the one hand, and the governance of infection, on the other? Other issues to explore include:

- The basic questions with anything but straightforward answers: Who owns clinical waste? When? Should anyone own it at all?
- How is clinical waste regulated? How does local regulation interact with global trade? Has globalisation transformed biotrash from a hazard into an investment opportunity?
- What is the historical background to the regulation of clinical waste? What issues of public health and private enterprise are at stake here?
- Is there a bioethics of biotrash?
- What does the giant "ikkk factor" in biotrash signify?
- What is the impact of genomics (flesh as information) on the regulation of clinical waste?
- What is the connection between biotrash and Human Subjects Research?

We'll be updating regularly, so do feel free to leave comments or to contact us with links or ideas.