ABSTRACT
Biosecurity discourses and practices gained currency during the past half-century. This chapter examines biosecurities as a constellation of constructs of concern to the broader field of Security Studies. It begins by tracing the development of biosecurity across agricultural, infectious disease, and defense industries before considering how communication scholars have applied empirical, interpretive, and critical lenses to aspects of biosecurity. It then explores how the concerns of biosecurity have coalesced into a new evolving paradigm for public health. Through a mini-analysis of the World Health Organization’s 2007 report, A Safer Future, it tracks how the paradigm of health security both continues and disrupts previous conceptions of public health, while offering opportunities for communication scholars to study and intervene in material and symbolic formations about pathogens and new forms of life.
