The Virus Touch
eBook - PDF

The Virus Touch

Theorizing Epidemic Media

  1. 316 pages
  2. English
  3. PDF
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - PDF

The Virus Touch

Theorizing Epidemic Media

About this book

In The Virus Touch Bishnupriya Ghosh argues that media are central to understanding emergent relations between viruses, humans, and nonhuman life. Writing in the 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 toward 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 accruing from diseases that arise from socioeconomic inequities and biopolitical neglect.

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Yes, you can access The Virus Touch by Bishnupriya Ghosh in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Social Sciences & Media Studies. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Contents
  3. List of Illustrations
  4. List of Abbreviations
  5. Acknowledgments
  6. Color Plates
  7. Introduction: Epidemic Media
  8. 1. The Epidemic Episteme: Health as Multispecies Politics
  9. 2. The -Morphic Image: Visualizing the Virus
  10. 3. The Sensible Medium: Clinical Translations of Blood
  11. 4. The Multispecies Kinesthetic: Tracking Animal Host Movement
  12. Conclusion: Media Theory (in a Pandemic)
  13. Notes
  14. Bibliography
  15. Index