The virus touch : theorizing epidemic media / Bishnupriya Ghosh.

  • Ghosh, Bishnupriya
Date:
2023
  • Books

About this work

Description

"In The Virus Touch Bishnupriya Ghosh argues that media are central to understanding emergent relations between viruses, humans, and nonhuman life. Writing in shadow of the HIV/AIDS and COVID-19 global pandemics, Ghosh theorizes "epidemic media" to show how epidemics are mediated in images, numbers, and movements through the processes of reading test results and tracking infection and mortality rates. Scientific, artistic, and activist epidemic media that make multispecies relations sensible and manageable eschew anthropocentric survival strategies and instead recast global public health crises as biological, social, and ecological catastrophes, pushing us towards a multispecies politics of health. Ghosh trains her analytic gaze on these mediations as expressed in the collection and analysis of blood samples as a form of viral media; the geospatialization of data that track viral hosts like wild primates; and the use of multisensory images to trace fluctuations in viral mutations. Studying how epidemic media inscribe, store, and transmit multispecies relations attunes us to the anthropogenic drivers of pathogenicity like deforestation or illegal wildlife trading and the vulnerabilities of diseases that arise from socioeconomic inequities and biopolitical neglect"-- Provided by publisher.

Publication/Creation

Durham : Duke University Press, 2023.

Physical description

xv, 284 pages, 16 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations (black and white, and colour) ; 23 cm.

Bibliographic information

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Contents

Introduction: Epidemic media -- The epidemic episteme : health as multispecies politics -- The -morphic image : visualizing the virus -- The sensible medium : clinical translations of blood -- The multispecies kinesthetic : tracking animal host movement -- Conclusion: Media theory (in a pandemic).

Languages

Where to find it

  • LocationStatus
    Medical Collection
    WA105 2023G42v
    Open shelves

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Identifiers

ISBN

  • 9781478019213
  • 1478019212