Bishnupriya Ghosh, "The Virus Touch: Theorizing Epidemic Media" (Duke UP, 2023)

Jul 26, 2024

Bishnupriya Ghosh, a thought leader in critical media studies and author of "The Virus Touch," dives into the intricate relationship between media and epidemics. She discusses how our perceptions of health crises, especially pandemics, are shaped by media narratives. Ghosh introduces the idea of 'multispecies relationality' and the significance of blood as a medium. She also explores the differences between global and planetary approaches to understanding epidemics, all while emphasizing the need for a multidimensional view of health issues.

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Intro

00:00 • 2min

Epidemic Media: Interconnections of Health and Environment

01:51 • 9min

Global Perspectives on Pandemics

11:19 • 9min

Epidemic Media and the Dynamics of Blood

20:42 • 14min

Exploring Prehension: Mediation Beyond Fear in Scientific Inquiry

35:11 • 2min

The Morphic Image in Media and Public Health

36:55 • 12min

Welcome to the Global Media & Communication podcast series. This podcast is a multimodal project powered by the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication (CARGC) at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. At CARGC, we produce and promote critical, interdisciplinary, and multimodal research on global media and communication. We aim to bridge academic scholarship and public life, bringing the best scholarship to bear on enduring global questions and pressing contemporary issues.

In this episode, Professor Bishnupriya Ghosh joins our host, Zehra Husain, to discuss her latest book, The Virus Touch: Theorizing Epidemic Media (Duke UP, 2023).

Over the course of the interview, you’ll learn about:

The origins of the book and how Ghosh became interested in the body as a material medium
The importance of conceptualizing global epidemics in multiscalar ways
What Ghosh means by multispecies relationality and “lively media”
The distinctions between the “global” and the “planetary”
Ghosh’s research process for the book and her thoughts on using an ethnographic mode
The media archive Ghosh assembled while conducting research for the book
How and why Ghosh conceptualizes blood as media in the book
The expansive sites, scales, and temporalities that Ghosh tracks across The Virus Touch

…and much more!

About the 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.” Learn more about the book on the publisher’s website!

Guest Biography

Bishnupriya Ghosh publishes in global media cultures, environmental media, and critical health studies.

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