BIO+TERROR: SCIENCE, SECURITY, SIMULATION
The United States government has spent more than $125 billion since 2001 to prepare the nation for bioterrorism. This dissertation examines the emergence of bioterrorism as a credible threat in the contemporary moment, considering how the preparedness practices of the security state constitute new biopolitical formations. To explore how changing ways of knowing disease and risk are reshaping communities, this multi-sited study investigates the material outcomes of biosecurity in people’s lives. It shows how complex histories of disease and terror are remade in the modern age to bring about new spaces and forms of biological citizenship. Through interview, observation and detailed historical research, this research considers three sites where bioterrorism is reshaping public life. At Montana’s Rocky Mountain Laboratory, the community protest of the first high-security Biosafety Level-4 facility built in the 21st century exemplifies how public fear of microbes reshapes laboratory spaces and constructs environmental geographies around new conceptions of life, risk, and disease. The creation and implementation of new biopreparedness programs at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta show how the alliance of