The National Health Service in the UK has developed The Atlas of Risk a publicly accessible internet tool to help people 'better understand risk.' Based on national death statistics compiled on a yearly basis, the Atlas allows one to make adjustments based on '...age, sex, and region to put threats to your health in perspective.'
The Atlas provides sobering realizations. For example, as a male between the ages of 20-44 who lives in the Northeast of England, the biggest risk to my own life is suicide. But why might the Atlas of Risk be interesting from a political perspective?
Well, these kind of analytic tools are representative of the creation of new forms of political classification (or subjectification) that are arising through the structures of contemporary governance tasked with managing public health risks.
As Nikolas Rose has argued, these analytic tools--as political techniques for governing people--shape our expectations with respect to the role that we need to play in the maintenance of our health, well-being, and vitality. In turn, these expectations reconfigure the way that we understand disease, fitness, our relationships with others, our relationships with biomedical authorities, and the way that we conceive of ourselves as variably constrained by the limits of corporeal existence.
To put it bluntly, health, and illness, become linked to an economy that wishes normalize particular forms of behaviour deemed healthy and proscribe those that are not. Normalization can be achieved through the promotion of actions that are understood to lead to desired outcomes as well as through sanctioning undesirable activities by individualizing responsibility for negative outcomes--in this case illness. That other contributing factors like socio-economic status--long considered to be a significant contributing factor to overall levels of health--get left out of these management tools is therefore more than an analytic oversight. It is a political statement.
Photo credit: Photomish Dan
Comments