This thesis examines the practices, politics and worlds of meaning surrounding Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD) mitigationamong wild reindeer in South Norway. It takes as its point of departure the discovery of CWD in a wild reindeer-doe in themountain-plateau Nordfjella in March 2016. The dissertation traces the aftermath of this discovery; the large-scale culling of and removal of wild reindeer, the establishment of a national CWD surveillance program for cervids in Norway, and the implementation and contestation of biosecurity measures aimed at CWD. 

The thesis analyses this through the notion of the 'event' as developed by the philosopher Deleuze; as a rupture that introduces a before and after, and one that pulls disparate and formerly disconnected beings, materials, technologies, practices, and affects into its gravitational field, which in turn make these into something new. I show that in order for the relational dynamics and politics of this event to be understood and accounted for properly, one cannot stay in the realm of humans only. Rather, one needs to come to grips with the agency of prions, reindeer and laboratory machines along with hunters, sheep-farmers, veterinarians, reindeer experts and policy-makers. This involves a politics that is more-than-human. 

Moreover, the thesis shows how one needs to account for the virtual quality of such politics, as one where the relating of such actors and their agentive capacities are marked by differences that exist as sinister potentials as much as empirically documented facts. Thus, the thesis makes clear how the CWD event is one in which people and reindeer become subject to the creative instability of the virtual difference inherent to that event, where spaces and times that may come about, generate divergent epistemologies and ontologies, speculative worlds, future projections as well as thoughts on the past. Such virtual potential creates a dynamic where dealing with determinate facts is constantly shadowed by indeterminacy. The thesis argues that coming to grips with such virtual politics – conceptually, theoretically and methodologically – is crucial for understanding how environmental politics and biosecurity is practiced in the Anthropocene.

The thesis is organized in three parts that loosely trace the journey of reindeer through the screening program. Reindeer move from living beings embedded in mountain ecologies to biological samples processed in ELISA machines and rendered legible as potential carriers of pathogenic prions. However, this tracing does not make a straight line. Along the way, the study detours into questions that emerged during fieldwork, particularly the problem of what the ‘wild’ in wild reindeer is, was and should be. Wildness carried symbolic, cultural, genetic, and biopolitical significance, especially when gene sequencing suggested that wild Norwegian reindeer might be more susceptible to CWD than domestic counterparts. Debates over what kind of reindeer should repopulate Nordfjella exposed multiple, sometimes contradictory enactments of wild reindeer. The dissertation is thus guided by two intertwined questions: What is Chronic Wasting Disease, and what are wild reindeer, and how do these questions become implicated in the case of CWD in Norway?