Producing the Vulnerable beings: The Human-Animal Relations in the Post-Pandemic Era

This article focuses on disease experience and its containment policy in South Korea. In particular, the outbreak of Covid-19 shifts the main idea of how to control the disease. Koreans experienced repeated and cyclic outbreaks of human and animal infectious diseases since the beginning of the new millennium. The experiences reflected in the containment policy in human and animal diseases. This research is interested in a fact that the public health policy produces new vulnerable beings, which include humans(migrant and part-time workers) and non-humans(domestic and wild animals) through preventive culling and spatialized approach to contain infectious diseases. Aggressive and centralized policy outsources risks of diseases onto vulnerable beings. Although global health organizations have put forward the concept of ‘One Health’, a holistic and interdisciplinary approach to solve the problem and promote health of humans, animals and the ecosystem, it is not suffice to stop from producing those vulnerable beings. This article shows how the space-based containment has been adopted as a public health strategy, and how the vulnerabilities of humans and animals in ecosystems were intensified in the process of disease prevention even in the One Health frame.