‘Nation’, ‘Migration’ and Tuberculosis

Tuberculosis (TB) is ‘re-emerging’ as a major public health challenge among marginalized urban communities in London (UK) and other European capitals. With some parts of London experiencing rates ‘comparable’ to those in the ‘developing South’ the emergence of the disease brings into sharp relief the interconnectedness of global concerns, including poverty, inequality and exclusion. This paper analyses the relationship between risk discourses and TB and, in particular, how risk is discursively and institutionally (re)produced within biomedical and public health discourses. Drawing on the ‘flows of people between richer and poorer’, it highlights ways in which public health discourses, suffused with structures that are gendered, raced and classed, produce and sustain constructions of the other, through discourses of migration, technologies of risk, classification, ‘immobilization’ and ‘space confinement’. The paper challenges (the often assumed) essentialized notion of risk categories by suggesting productions of risk are always being reworked and renegotiated because of the different socio-historical and contextual formations of TB.