The Virus Touch: Theorizing Epidemic Media

Bishnupriya Ghosh's "The Virus Touch" explores how media mediate emergent relations between viruses, humans, and nonhuman life, highlighting the need for multispecies politics of health. She examines epidemic media through blood sample collection, data geospatialization, and multisensory images, highlighting the anthropogenic drivers of pathogenicity and vulnerabilities.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 304 pages
Publication date: 07 April 2023
Publisher: Duke University Press

Bishnupriya Ghosh's book, "The Virus Touch," explores the central role of media in understanding the complex relationships between viruses, humans, and nonhuman life. In the context of the HIV/AIDS and COVID-19 global pandemics, Ghosh introduces the concept of "epidemic media" to examine how epidemics are represented, communicated, and experienced through various forms of visual, numerical, and movement-based information. Through her analysis, Ghosh highlights the importance of scientific, artistic, and activist epidemic media in challenging anthropocentric survival strategies and reframing global public health crises as biological, social, and ecological catastrophes. She emphasizes the need to adopt a multispecies politics of health that recognizes the interconnectedness of all forms of life and addresses the anthropogenic drivers of pathogenicity, such as deforestation and illegal wildlife trading, as well as the vulnerabilities resulting from socioeconomic inequities and biopolitical neglect. Ghosh's work draws on a range of sources, including the collection and analysis of blood samples as 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. By studying how epidemic media inscribe, store, and transmit multispecies relations, Ghosh helps us to become more attuned to the anthropogenic drivers of pathogenicity and the vulnerabilities accruing from diseases that arise from socioeconomic inequities and biopolitical neglect.

Weight: 456g
Dimension: 232 x 156 x 24 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781478019213