Paper short abstract:

Images have accompanied the social from its origin.We want to reclaim their original status throughout the concept of State of Emergency. We will show some images from recent epidemics (zika, ebola...) understood as scenarios in order to unfold what is an state of emergency and their implications.

Paper long abstract:

Images have accompanied the social from its origin. Despite having their own ontological status in a historical period, they are currently subordinated by text and discourse, becoming just the mere illustrations of the text meaning. We want to recover the original sense about images, starting from the latest theories about Visual Culture or Visual Anthropology.

On the other hand, as part of our current Study Case about epidemics and biosurveillance, we will expose our particular idea about scenario, what in preparedness for epidemics traditionally means a story illustrating visions of possible future or aspects of possible future (Joint Research Center). The novelty of this work is to present images about different pandemics as scenarios, where biomedical and legal knowledge is inlaid. Actually, images work as states of emergency in a wider and updated sense than Giorgio Agamben. On them, not only politics and biomedics are undifferentiated, but also future and past, or History.

For this purpose, we will bring some samples about this Study Case, showing images about the last ebola, N1H1 or Zika epidemics extracted from European legislations, Spanish protocols and media news or some Focus Groups we are carrying out.

For this reason, we request any audiovisual device in order to project the material. With this work, we pretend to go forward in the research performed by other STS authors like Andrew Lakoff or Carlo Caduff; and also in the theoretical work from Gilles Deleuze, Walter Benjamin or Sarah Pink.