Lorna Weir

York University, Sociology, Graduate Program in Health Equity, Graduate Programme in Social and Political Thought, Faculty Member

York University, Sociology, Faculty Member

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My research is located at the intersection of human health, the life sciences, and critical social theory. For some time my work has been focused on biopolitics. I have published on the invention of “perinatal mortality” in mid-twentieth century medicine and its effects on unsettling of birth as the entry into human status. In Global Public Health Vigilance: Creating A World on Alert (Lorna Weir and Eric Mykhalovskiy), I moved to explore the period 1992-2005 in global public health when infectious/communicable disease, historically the focus of international disease control, was displaced by “international public health emergencies,” and a novel form of global health surveillance fashioned.

My current research seeks to trouble maximalist interpretations of biopolitics as the entry of life into power. Foucault’s concept of biopolitics was bifurcated and inconsistent, extending from the expansive formulation just mentioned to one intrinsically linked with the rise of modern biology. I believe Foucauldian biopolitics to be incomprehensible without reference to late eighteenth and early nineteenth century biology and medicine. This reading theorizes biopolitics more sharply and narrowly as the politics and governance of life conceived biologically.

I also have a few side irons in the fire: 1) the necropolitics and biopolitics in the work of Achille Mbembe; 2) second generation genomics and biosecurity; 3) giant pandas and the theory of the gift ;.

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Books by Lorna Weir

Global Public Health Vigilance: Creating a World on Alert (New York and Abdingdon, UK: Routledge, 2010) ). Lorna Weir and Eric Mykhalovskiy,

Global Public Health Vigilance is the first sociological book to investigate recent changes in ho... more Global Public Health Vigilance is the first sociological book to investigate recent changes in how global public health authorities imagine and respond to international threats to human health.

This book explores a remarkable period of conceptual innovation during which infectious disease, historically the focus of international disease control, was displaced by "international public health emergencies," a concept that brought new responsibilities to public health authorities, helping to shape a new project of global public health security.

Drawing on research conducted at the World Health Organization, this book analyzes the formation of a new social apparatus, global public health vigilance, for detecting, responding to and containing international public health emergencies. Between 1995 and 2005 a new form of global health surveillance was invented, international communicable disease control was securitized, and international health law was fundamentally revised.

This timely volume raises critical questions about the institutional effects of the concept of emerging infectious diseases, the role of the news media in global health surveillance, the impact of changes in international health law on public health reasoning and practice, and the reconstitution of the World Health Organization as a power beyond national sovereignty and global governance. It initiates a new research agenda for social science research on public health.

Pregnancy, Risk and Biopolitics: On the Threshold of the Living Subject (London and New York: Routledge, 2006)

Pregnancy, Risk and Biopolitics: On the Threshold of the Living Subject examines the unsettling ... more Pregnancy, Risk and Biopolitics: On the Threshold of the Living Subject examines the unsettling of birth as the entry into human status in mid-twentieth century medicine, providing a new understanding of how maternal-fetal division was historically formed. This book argues that when physicians of the 1930s invented a new kind of time - the “perinatal” interval - linking the fetus and newborn just prior to, during and after birth, they produced a new threshold of entry into human status, a perinatal threshold. The perinatal threshold problematized birth as the beginning of the living subject, distinguishing the time and body of the fetus from the pregnant woman, providing the precondition for late twentieth century litigation about the legal address of pregnancy and maternal-fetal conflict. When reducing perinatal mortality rates became the primary objective of maternal and child health care in the global north during the 1960s, pregnancy became a time for routinely optimizing population prior to birth through risk measures, with populations such as Aboriginal peoples that had higher than national perinatal mortality rates subjected to alternative and harsh preventive measures. This book looks at the logic and effects of health governance that has tried to reduce mortality before birth.

Governing Medically Assisted Human Reproduction (Toronto: Centre of Criminology, University of Toronto, 1997) Edited.

This collection originated in an international, interdisciplinary workshop held in 1996 that was ... more This collection originated in an international, interdisciplinary workshop held in 1996 that was co-sponsored by the Centre of Criminology, University of Toronto, and the York Centre for Health Studies, York University (Toronto). Designed as a response to the Royal Commission on New Reproductive Technologies (Canada), the proceedings of this Workshop place public policy debates about medically assisted human reproduction (AHR) in the context of knowledges that have been marginal to the policy process: anthropology, sociology and political science. Legal questions pertinent to AHR are approached in terms of general strategies and the limits of law.

The collection is divided into 4 themes: rethinking reproductive freedom, negotiating kinship, legal strategies, and regulatory bodies.

Contributors include: Margrit Eichler (Ontario Institute for Studies in Eduction, UT), Rosalind P. Petchesky (Hunter College and International Reproductive Rights Action Group), Marilyn Strathern (University of Cambridge), Sari Tudiver (Women's Health Clinic, Winnipeg), and Louis Waller (Infertility Treatment Authority, Victoria, Australia).

Beyond Political Correctness: Toward the Inclusive Academy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995). Co-edited, Stepher Richer and Lorna Weir.

Papers by Lorna Weir

Regulating New Reproductive and Genetic Technologies: A Feminist View of Recent Canadian Government Initiatives

Feminist Studies, 1997

... a bill that has been intro-duced in Parliament, although not yet passed into law-may also cre... more

A Genealogy of Global Health Security

International Political Sociology, 2012

human security debates about HIV/AIDS also saw the mass delivery of millions of antiretroviral th... more human security debates about HIV/AIDS also saw the mass delivery of millions of antiretroviral therapies to people living in sub-Saharan Africa and other developing countries. Nor will this tendency disappear anytime soon, as current anxieties about a range of noncommunicable lifestyle "time bombs" are also increasingly managed by resorting to surgeries and pills (obesity) and nicotine replacement therapy (smoking). In the end, then, the medicalization of insecurity demands of us citizens that in order to be secure, we must first become patients. Viewed in this new light, different lines of research on health security begin to open up. How, for example, are medical knowledges and metaphors shaping the practice of military intervention and counterinsurgency practice? What new medicines are being developed to make soldiers less fearful in combat or to tire less quickly? What, moreover, are the legal and political strategies through which citizens are persuaded to ingest medical countermeasures? Why and how are these new political rationalities resisted? What is the role of political economy, and indeed pharmaceutical businesses, in the rise of health security? How does this medicalization of security also fan new anxieties, especially around the emergence of diseases for which there are no drugs, or indeed around diseases that are becoming drug resistant. These are some of the new lines of flight emerging from an international political sociology of global health security.

Lorna Weir

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