Full Description
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.
Contents
List of Illustrations vii
List of Abbreviations xi
Acknowledgments xiii
Introduction: Epidemic Media 1
1. The Epidemic Episteme: Health as Multispecies Politics 35
2. The -Morphic Image: Visualizing the Virus 77
3. The Sensible Medium: Clinical Translations of Blood 113
4. The Multispecies Kinesthetic: Tracking Animal Host Movements 157
Conclusion: Media Theory (in a Pandemic) 199
Notes 211
Bibliography 255
Index 277
