Making Threats: Biofears and Environmental Anxieties
Today we live in times of proliferating fears. The daily updates on the ongoing 'war on terror' amplify fear and anxiety as if they were necessary and important aspects of our reality. Concerns about the environment increasingly take center-stage, as stories and images abound about deadly viruses, alien species invasions, scarcity of oil, water, food; safety of GMOs, biological weapons, and fears of overpopulation. Making Threats: Biofears and Environmental Anxieties addresses how such environmental and biological fears are used to manufacture threats to individual, national, and global security. Contributors from environmental studies, political science, international security, biology, sociology and anthropology discuss what they share in common: the view that fears should be critically examined to avoid unnecessary alarm and scapegoating of people and nations as the 'enemy Other'. In these highly original and thought-provoking essays, Making Threats focuses on five themes: security, scarcity, purity, circulation and terror. No other book has systematically examined the proliferation of fear in the context of current world events and from such a multidisciplinary perspective. It consolidates in one place cutting edge research and reflection on how the contemporary landscape of fear shapes and is shaped by environmental and biological discourses. By uncovering the linguistic tools that make fear resonate in the public consciousness, by identifying the interests that create or are sustained by fears, in short by giving fears histories, Making Threats: Biofears and Environmental Anxieties engages with some of the most potent and disturbing political and cultural aspects of the contemporary scene.
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Making Threats: Biofears and Environmental Anxieties
Today we live in times of proliferating fears. The daily updates on the ongoing 'war on terror' amplify fear and anxiety as if they were necessary and important aspects of our reality. Concerns about the environment increasingly take center-stage, as stories and images abound about deadly viruses, alien species invasions, scarcity of oil, water, food; safety of GMOs, biological weapons, and fears of overpopulation. Making Threats: Biofears and Environmental Anxieties addresses how such environmental and biological fears are used to manufacture threats to individual, national, and global security. Contributors from environmental studies, political science, international security, biology, sociology and anthropology discuss what they share in common: the view that fears should be critically examined to avoid unnecessary alarm and scapegoating of people and nations as the 'enemy Other'. In these highly original and thought-provoking essays, Making Threats focuses on five themes: security, scarcity, purity, circulation and terror. No other book has systematically examined the proliferation of fear in the context of current world events and from such a multidisciplinary perspective. It consolidates in one place cutting edge research and reflection on how the contemporary landscape of fear shapes and is shaped by environmental and biological discourses. By uncovering the linguistic tools that make fear resonate in the public consciousness, by identifying the interests that create or are sustained by fears, in short by giving fears histories, Making Threats: Biofears and Environmental Anxieties engages with some of the most potent and disturbing political and cultural aspects of the contemporary scene.
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Overview

Today we live in times of proliferating fears. The daily updates on the ongoing 'war on terror' amplify fear and anxiety as if they were necessary and important aspects of our reality. Concerns about the environment increasingly take center-stage, as stories and images abound about deadly viruses, alien species invasions, scarcity of oil, water, food; safety of GMOs, biological weapons, and fears of overpopulation. Making Threats: Biofears and Environmental Anxieties addresses how such environmental and biological fears are used to manufacture threats to individual, national, and global security. Contributors from environmental studies, political science, international security, biology, sociology and anthropology discuss what they share in common: the view that fears should be critically examined to avoid unnecessary alarm and scapegoating of people and nations as the 'enemy Other'. In these highly original and thought-provoking essays, Making Threats focuses on five themes: security, scarcity, purity, circulation and terror. No other book has systematically examined the proliferation of fear in the context of current world events and from such a multidisciplinary perspective. It consolidates in one place cutting edge research and reflection on how the contemporary landscape of fear shapes and is shaped by environmental and biological discourses. By uncovering the linguistic tools that make fear resonate in the public consciousness, by identifying the interests that create or are sustained by fears, in short by giving fears histories, Making Threats: Biofears and Environmental Anxieties engages with some of the most potent and disturbing political and cultural aspects of the contemporary scene.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781461665748
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
Publication date: 11/01/2005
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
Pages: 272
File size: 2 MB

About the Author

Betsy Hartmann is the Director of the Population and Development Program at Hampshire College. Banu Subramaniam is Assistant Professor of Women's Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and Charles Zerner is Professor of Environmental Studies at Sarah Lawrence College.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 Wild in the Streets: The Political Economy of Threats and the Production of Fear
Chapter 2 Making Civilian-Soldiers: The Militarization of Inner Space
Chapter 3 Reflections: Consuming National Security
Chapter 4 Malthusianism and the Terror of Scarcity
Chapter 5 Reflections: Scarcity, Modernity, Terror
Chapter 6 De-coding the Debate on Frankenfood
Chapter 7 The Aliens Have Landed: Reflections on Biological Invasions
Chapter 8 Reflections: (Im)Pure Biology: Deadly Synergy of Racialization and Geneticization
Chapter 9 Emerging Cartographies of Environmental Danger: Africa, Ebola, and AIDS
Chapter 10 Reflections: Feeling Invasion
Chapter 11 Embedded Terrorism: Political Determinants of Bioterrorism and Global Epidemic
Chapter 12 Pernicious Peasants and Angry Young Men: The Strategic Demography of Threats
Chapter 13 Reflections: Bioterrorism and National Security: Peripheral Threats, Core Vulnerabilites
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