Introduction

Abstract

The concept of the emerging epidemic can evoke many different responses, but it is a major topic of our time, garnering attention in scholarship across the sciences, social sciences, and humanities, in the mass media, and in popular fiction and films. There is a designated journal and multiple study centers devoted to understanding, monitoring, and ultimately defeating emerging epidemics. Regardless of the venue, however, emerging epidemics create a great deal of popular fear, and they symbolize the continuing (and new) vulnerabilities of our late modern age. The contributors to this volume attempt to put this significance in context, offering critical, historical, structural, social constructionist, ecological, and political economic perspectives on the concept altogether or on specific epidemics. These authors deeply consider the knowledge we make of emerging epidemics and the meaning that knowledge has in our lives. Throughout this volume, social and economic justice and the representation of the needs of politically marginalized groups are matters of particular concern.

Citation

Mukherjea, A. (2010), "Introduction", Mukherjea, A. (Ed.) Understanding Emerging Epidemics: Social and Political Approaches (Advances in Medical Sociology, Vol. 11), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. xiii-xv. https://doi.org/10.1108/S1057-6290(2010)0000011004