Mapping Neoliberalism: Animal Health and the Spatial Practices of Disease Management

Abstract

Focusing on the governing of animal disease risk, this chapter applies three analytical approaches—maps as communication, maps as power, and mapping in practice—to examine how maps are involved in the assembling as well as dis-assembling of neoliberal approaches to disease management. Our analysis reveals that maps contribute to neoliberal assembly through instilling “vigilance” among farmers and creating new “responsibilized” biosecurity subjectivities; enabling disease responses that interfere as little as possible with trade flows; and contributing to the “de-professionalization” of veterinary expertise. At the same time, the chapter highlights a number of crucial ways in which maps impose limits on how neoliberal governance is assembled through the adaptation of maps by veterinarians to fit local circumstances, the use of maps by farmers to invoke alternative discourses and practices of responsibility and the mobility and materiality of pathogenic life, which undermines the geometry of disease inscribed in maps.