Full Description
This book examines what it means to live in an epidemiological reality, exploring the worldbuilding properties of epidemiology through the lens of critical theory, literary analysis, and visual culture. Whether we want it or not, we live in a world made of statistical correlations, risk factors, and social determinants of health, animal reservoirs and spillovers, containment strategies and curves to be flattened, prophylactic measures, and syndromic surveillance systems detecting in real-time potential outbreaks. This book uses a series of vignettes to show that we have lived in a version of that reality for quite some time now, even before the formalization of epidemiological tools and concepts at the beginning of the twentieth century.
Contents
.- 1. Stinky Contexts (Abbott Pandemic Defense Coalition, 2023).
.- 2. Epidemiological Realism (The Horla, 1887).
.- 3. Facing Toxicity (New York Health Department, 2019).
.- 4. Diagnosing Exemplarity (Still Alice, 2014).
.- 5. Picturing Incidence (Clara Jacobi, 1689; Stromae, 2013).
.- 6. In the Meantime (120 Beats Per Minutes, 2017).
.- 7. Statistical Interlude (Halbwachs, 1913).
.- 8. Occupational Realism (Severance, 2018).
.- 9. Scenes of Plotlessness (Woolf, 1926; Camus, 1946).
.- 10. Scenes of Contagion (Poussin, ca. 1630; Soderbergh, 2011).
.- 11. Scenes of Immunization (Driftwood, 1947).
.- 12. The Rabid Wolf and the Sovereign (Bauhin, 1591).
.- 13. Scenes of Awkwardness (Little Joe, 2019).
.- 14. The Sentinel Effect.
.- 15. Epilogue: The Sentinel Effect.
