Paper short abstract:

Pandemics are represented as a threat to health, and to economic and political wellbeing on a global scale. By drawing upon the examples of London and Frankfurt, the paper looks at how a not-yet future of virological emergence is calculated, imagined, and performed through pandemic preparedness.

Paper long abstract:

This paper deals with specific visions of a potential or not-yet future: that of an influenza pandemic. Pandemics are currently represented as a threat to health, and to economic and political wellbeing on a global scale. They seem to be not only of biomedical importance, but pandemic fears are drawn into the sociotechnical domains of resilience planning, surveillance systems, and into globalised expert networks. Within these rationales, a state of risk is made the rule rather than the exception. Countries like the UK or Germany have adopted the need to prepare for future outbreak events by designing preparedness planning systems.

Following Anderson's (2010) attempt to systematise the logics of anticipatory action, the paper will analyse pandemic preparedness as a practice. In order to understand how the not-yet future of an influenza pandemic is made present and tangible, the paper first discusses how pandemic futures are embedded in and calculated through specific spatio-temporal relationships. Second, the paper focuses on the construction of potential outbreak scenarios underlying pandemic preparedness. Third, it looks at the performance of a not-yet future through local emergency exercises. It will be argued that pandemic preparedness bridges spatial, technological and administrative gaps between globally circulating viruses and local areas of intervention, thereby enacting potential futures as a matter of local concern.

The paper is based upon ethnographic fieldwork among health professionals, resilience planners, and local authorities in London and Frankfurt; it combines a critical global health perspective with STS-informed insights into the socio-material contingencies of future-related expertise.