Writing anthropandemics – the strangely connected social geographies of COVID-19, plastic waste, and obesity.

The recent global spread of COVID-19 alongside a plethora of other growing phenomena of the Anthropocene increasingly affected by human activity – fires, flooding, droughts – urgently invites a reconsideration of the concepts of epidemics and pandemics. To date however, research into pandemics has focused almost entirely on biomedical aspects such as rate of contagion, origin of the offending organism, and lethality. This article seeks to suggest that whilst these foci appear logical and necessary, research must be expanded to include pandemic under the Foucauldian canon of biopower. Whilst socio-political geographies of power and control have been neglected hitherto, not only is there a case for considering epidemics/pandemics as anthropogenic epiphenomena, the importance of human socio-political dispositifs, cultures, and transport networks of consumption is sufficiently important to both the origins and spread of biomedical illness, that they merit a different and more inclusive appellation, anthropandemic. This article outlines why this might be so and deploys relevant methods of analysis such as biopower and ANT to suggest ways in which a holistic research methodology might be developed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]