Crisis futurities: How scientists in Kenya anticipate pathogen threats through genealogical analysis

Constructing a genealogy of pathogen-responder relations, I reveal how pathogens register in complex ecosystems of human intervention.

I illustrate how a grouping of pathogens orients the sensibilities of scientists toward calamity and dystopia through what I conceptualize as 'crisis futurities'—doing so in ways that drive biopolitical impulses toward protecting life, mitigating human suffering, and experimentality.

Crisis futurities spring from anticipatory temporalities scientists assign to pathogens: incubation and latency periods; speed and modality of spread; and causal risk factors.

Intervention from this perspective is driven by an ethics of precision; a calculus of planning; and an experimental wrestling with 'the hypothetical' that anticipates the potential devastation and political consequences of pathogens.