Read Books Online and Download eBooks, EPub, PDF, Mobi, Kindle, Text Full Free.
The Dictionary Of Coronavirus Culture
Download The Dictionary Of Coronavirus Culture full books in PDF, epub, and Kindle. Read online The Dictionary Of Coronavirus Culture ebook anywhere anytime directly on your device. Fast Download speed and no annoying ads. We cannot guarantee that every ebooks is available!
Book Synopsis The Dictionary of Coronavirus Culture by : Alan Bradshaw
Download or read book The Dictionary of Coronavirus Culture written by Alan Bradshaw and published by Watkins Media Limited. This book was released on 2020-10-13 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Dictionary of Coronavirus Culture presents an A-Z of life in lockdown. Taking everyday terms that capture the lived experience of lockdown — like chocolate, streaming, ageing, health, clapping, social distancing, dystopia, and frontline workers — and discussing them with a range of writers, theorists, and academics, it provides unusually accessible and friendly analysis of our shared historic moment. With contributions from Lynne Segal, Jo Grady, Kate Soper, Stefano Harney, and many more, The Dictionary of Coronavirus Culture is designed to help us come to terms with what COVID-19 and the associated lockdowns mean for us, and the world around us.
Download or read book Pandexicon written by Wayne Grady and published by Greystone Books Ltd. This book was released on 2023-03-07 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Did you keep a list of the words coined by Covid? Wayne Grady did! They're deftly woven into a journal/timeline, taking us through two years of surrealism and limbo.—Margaret Atwood This exploration of the many new terms of the Covid-19 pandemic provides insight into the ways an ever-evolving vocabulary helped us cope with our anxiety and adapt to a new reality. When the pandemic struck in early 2020, Wayne Grady started collecting the words and phrases that arose from our shared global experience. Some, such as “uptick” and “pivot,” had existed before but now took on new meaning, and others, such as “covidivorce,” “quarantini,” “covexit,” and “shecession,” appeared for the first time, their meaning instantly clear. Through this new vocabulary, we became more able to adapt to change, to domesticate it in a sense, and to reduce our fears. Moving from the very beginning of the pandemic (the “Before Times”) and our early response to it through the peaks and troughs of the various waves in countries throughout the world, and ending with a contemplation of what the “After Times” might look like, this book takes us on a journey through the pandemic and illuminates both how this new language has unfolded and how it has changed the way we think about ourselves and each other.
Download or read book COVID-19 written by J. Michael Ryan and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-12-30 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The SARS-CoV-2 virus, and the associated COVID-19 pandemic, is perhaps the greatest threat to life, and lifestyles, the world has known in more than a century. The scholarship included here provides critical insights into the institutional responses, communal consequences, cultural adaptations, and social politics that lie at the heart of this pandemic. This volume maps out the ways in which the pandemic has impacted (most often disproportionately) societies, the successes and failures of means used to combat the virus, and the considerations and future possibilities – both positive and negative – that lie ahead. While the pandemic has brought humanity together in some noteworthy ways, it has also laid bare many of the systemic inequalities that lie at the foundation of our global society. This volume is a significant step toward better understanding these impacts. The work presented here represents a remarkable diversity and quality of impassioned scholarship and is a timely and critical advance in knowledge related to the pandemic. This volume and its companion, COVID-19: Volume I: Global Pandemic, Societal Responses, Ideological Solutions, are the result of the collaboration of more than 50 of the leading social scientists from across five continents. The breadth and depth of the scholarship is matched only by the intellectual and global scope of the contributors themselves. The insights presented here have much to offer not just to an understanding of the ongoing world of COVID-19, but also to helping us (re-) build, and better shape, the world beyond.
Book Synopsis Lockdown Cultures by : Stella Bruzzi
Download or read book Lockdown Cultures written by Stella Bruzzi and published by UCL Press. This book was released on 2022-11-10 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lockdown Cultures is both a cultural response to our extraordinary times and a manifesto for the arts and humanities and their role in our post-pandemic society. This book offers a unique response to the question of how the humanities commented on and were impacted by one of the dominant crises of our times: the Covid-19 pandemic. While the role of engineers, epidemiologists and, of course, medics is assumed, Lockdown Cultures illustrates some of the ways in which the humanities understood and analysed 2020–21, the year of lockdown and plague. Though the impulse behind the book was topical, underpinning the richly varied and individual essays is a lasting concern with the value of the humanities in the twenty-first century. Each contributor approaches this differently but there are two dominant strands: how art and culture can help us understand the Covid crisis; and how the value of the humanities can be demonstrated by engaging with cultural products from the past. The result is a book that serves as testament to the humanities’ reinvigorated and reforged sense of identity, from the perspective of UCL and one of the leading arts and humanities faculties in the world. It bears witness to a globally impactful event while showcasing interdisciplinary thinking and examining how the pandemic has changed how we read, watch, write and educate. More than thirty individual contributions collectively reassert the importance of the arts and humanities for contemporary society.
Book Synopsis The Cultural Politics of COVID-19 by : John Nguyet Erni
Download or read book The Cultural Politics of COVID-19 written by John Nguyet Erni and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-08-22 with total page 387 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: COVID-19 isn’t simply a viral pathogen nor is it, strictly speaking, the trigger of a global pandemic. Since the outbreak began in late-2019, an outpouring of clinical and scientific research, together with an array of public health initiatives, has sought to understand, mitigate, or even eradicate the virus. This book represents a snapshot of critical responses by researchers from 10 countries and 4 continents, in a collective effort to explore how Cultural Studies can contribute to our struggle to persevere in a "no normal" horizon, with no clear end in sight. Together, the essays address important questions at the intersection of culture, power, politics, and public health: What are the possible outlines for the panic-pandemic complex? How has the pandemic been endowed with meanings and affective registers, often at the tipping points where existing social relations and medical understanding were being rapidly displaced by new ones? How can societies discover ways of living with, through, and against COVID that do not simply reproduce existing hierarchies and power relations? The 30 essays comprising this collection, along with the editors’ introduction, explore the formative period of the COVID pandemic, from mid-2020 to mid-2021. They are grouped into three sections – ‘Racializations,’ ‘Media, Data, and Fragments of the Popular,’ and ‘Un/knowing the Pandemic’ – themes that animate, but do not exhaust, the complex cultural and political life of COVID-19 with respect to identity, technology, and epistemology. No doubt, readers will chart their own pathway as the pandemic continues to rage on, based on their own unique circumstances. This book provides critical-intellectual guideposts for the way forward – toward an uncertain future, without guarantees. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal, Cultural Studies.
Book Synopsis Culture, Crisis and COVID-19 by : Charles Hampden-Turner
Download or read book Culture, Crisis and COVID-19 written by Charles Hampden-Turner and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2021 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book addresses the twin goals of "Build Back Better" than before the pandemic and the Great Reset called for by the World Economic Forum. Can we use this crisis to re-vision capitalism as a life-preserving, livelihood-enriching phenomenon? All businesses now face the challenge of prospering while serving and saving lives. This should have been their mission all along! The pandemic is killing disproportionately those whom we have neglected. Deaths in Europe and the Americas are between ten and one hundred times more frequent than deaths in China and the region influenced by Chinese civilization for two thousand years. This is all despite the weeks of warning we had and wasted. Since Western governments must massively stimulate their economies in any case, spending trillions, this is a priceless opportunity to usher in certain kinds of world-saving businesses, and show out those kinds of business that wreck our eco-system. We have a priceless opportunity to create an economy that serves all its stakeholders, customers, employees, suppliers and those who physically create wealth, not just those who trade in shares. This virus has sniffed out our selfishness, our toxic levels of individualism and self-indulgence. We should never waste a crisis on recriminations. It is an opportunity to reset our moral compass to re-discover that the true mission of business enterprise is to serve humanity with higher goals. Leadership must be dedicated to service, not self-aggrandizement.
Book Synopsis Exploring the Consequences of the COVID-19 Pandemic by : Usha Rana
Download or read book Exploring the Consequences of the COVID-19 Pandemic written by Usha Rana and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 2022-06-08 with total page 512 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This unique and topical book assesses the impact of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) on a multitude of different aspects of human life. With chapters from researchers from a diverse selection of countries, this new volume, Exploring the Consequences of the COVID-19 Pandemic: Social, Cultural, Economic, and Psychological Insights and Perspectives, provides an insightful understanding of the challenges and impacts of COVID-19 on mental health, health care, gender issues, education, social institutions, and more. The diverse studies in this volume look at community responses and social challenges during COVID-19, covering topics such as social protection challenges and measures, the responsibility of the state to its citizens, and human rights and inhuman wrongs. The volume also examines health challenges and consequences of COVID-19, such as the impact on maternal and reproductive health, on mental health, the psychological effects of isolation, and more. The volume also includes studies on gender issues such as the plight of women migrant workers during the pandemic, feminist activism during quarantine, the impact on vulnerable groups of society, and how the pandemic affected interpersonal relations and behavior. The volume also takes a look at the roles of different organizations and professions and their reactions to the health crisis, including police, journalists and the media, and educators. The issues of the closure of schools and colleges and remote learning are also addressed. There is even a mathematical study of optimum budget allocation for social projects to control the COVID-19 pandemic. The enlightening volume provides an in-depth understanding of sociocultural responses to the COVID-19 and its consequences on society and will be of value to many sectors of society, including government and nongovernment organizations, policymakers and policy analysts, medical research organizations, schools and universities, healthcare practitioners, sociologists, and many others.
Download or read book Lockdown Cultures written by and published by . This book was released on 2022 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lockdown Cultures is both a cultural response to our extraordinary times and a manifesto for the arts and humanities and their role in our post-pandemic society. This book offers a unique response to the question of how the humanities commented on and were impacted by one of the dominant crises of our times: the Covid-19 pandemic. While the role of engineers, epidemiologists and, of course, medics is assumed, Lockdown Cultures illustrates some of the ways in which the humanities understood and analysed 2020-21, the year of lockdown and plague. Though the impulse behind the book was topical, underpinning the richly varied and individual essays is a lasting concern with the value of the humanities in the twenty-first century. Each contributor approaches this differently but there are two dominant strands: how art and culture can help us understand the Covid crisis; and how the value of the humanities can be demonstrated by engaging with cultural products from the past. The result is a book that serves as testament to the humanities' reinvigorated and reforged sense of identity, from the perspective of UCL and one of the leading arts and humanities faculties in the world. It bears witness to a globally impactful event while showcasing interdisciplinary thinking and examining how the pandemic has changed how we read, watch, write and educate. More than thirty individual contributions collectively reassert the importance of the arts and humanities for contemporary society.
Book Synopsis Negotiating the Pandemic by : Inayat Ali
Download or read book Negotiating the Pandemic written by Inayat Ali and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2022-03-30 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book centers on negotiations around cultural, governmental, and individual constructions of COVID-19. It considers how the coronavirus pandemic has been negotiated in different cultures and countries, with the final part of the volume focusing on South Asia and Pakistan in particular. The chapters include auto-ethnographic accounts and ethnographic explorations that reflect upon experiences of living with the pandemic and its implications for all areas of life. The book explicates people’s dealings with COVID-19 at various levels, situates the spread of rumors, conspiracy theories, and new social rituals within micro- and/or macro-contexts, and describes the interplay between the virus and various institutionalized forms of inequalities and structural vulnerabilities. Bringing together a variety of perspectives, the volume relates to the past, describes the Covidian present, and offers futuristic implications. It enlists distinct imaginaries based on current understandings of an extraordinary challenge that holds significant importance for our human future.
Book Synopsis Being Human during COVID by : Kristin Ann Hass
Download or read book Being Human during COVID written by Kristin Ann Hass and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2021-11-29 with total page 423 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Science has taken center stage during the COVID-19 crisis; scientists named and diagnosed the virus, traced its spread, and worked together to create a vaccine in record time. But while science made the headlines, the arts and humanities were critical in people’s daily lives. As the world went into lockdown, literature, music, and media became crucial means of connection, and historians reminded us of the resonance of the past as many of us heard for the first time about the 1918 influenza pandemic. As the twindemics of COVID-19 and racial injustice tore through the United States, a contested presidential race unfolded, which one candidate described as “a battle for the soul of the nation." Being Human during COVID documents the first year of the pandemic in real time, bringing together humanities scholars from the University of Michigan to address what it feels like to be human during the COVID-19 crisis. Over the course of the pandemic, the questions that occupy the humanities—about grieving and publics, the social contract and individual rights, racial formation and xenophobia, ideas of home and conceptions of gender, narrative and representations and power—have become shared life-or-death questions about how human societies work and how culture determines our collective fate. The contributors in this collection draw on scholarly expertise and lived experience to try to make sense of the unfamiliar present in works that range from traditional scholarly essays, to personal essays, to visual art projects. The resulting book is shot through with fear, dread, frustration, and prejudice, and, on a few occasions, with a thrilling sense of hope.
Download or read book Behind the Mask written by Ben Bridges and published by University Press of Colorado. This book was released on 2023-11-15 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Vernacular responses have been crucial for communities seeking creative ways to cope with the coronavirus pandemic. With most people locked down and separated from the normal ebb and flow of life for an extended period of time, COVID-19 inspired community and creativity, adaptation and flexibility, traditional knowledge, resistance, and dynamism. Removing people from assumed norms and daily lives, the pandemic provided a moment of insight into the nature of vernacular culture as it was used, abused, celebrated, critiqued, and discarded. In Behind the Mask, contributors from the USA, the UK, and Scandinavia emphasize the choices that individual people and communities made during the COVID pandemic, prioritizing the everyday lives of people enduring this health crisis. Despite vernacular’s potential nod to dominant or external culture, it is the strong connection to the local that grounds the vernacular within the experiential context that it occupies. Exploring the nature and shape of vernacular responses to the ongoing public health crisis, Behind the Mask documents processes that are otherwise likely to be forgotten. Including different ethnographic presents, contributors capture moments during the pandemic rather than upon reflection, making the work important to students and scholars of folklore and ethnology, as well as general readers interested in the COVID pandemic.
Book Synopsis COVID-19, Communication and Culture by : Fiona Rossette-Crake
Download or read book COVID-19, Communication and Culture written by Fiona Rossette-Crake and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2023 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book analyses some of the many upheavals brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic through the lens of the COVID-19-communication-culture interface, with a particular focus on the new global, virtual workplace. It brings together a pluridisciplinary and multinational team of researchers from the fields of sociology and organisational studies, discourse analysis, linguistics, communication and cultural studies, and includes testimonials from actors within the professional sector such as international managers, consultants and foreign trade advisors. The collection examines a wide range of phenomena including communication on the pandemic by public authorities, the pandemic as a discursive construct, the digital turn and its impact on communication, the role of social media, as well as national diplomacy and questions of surveillance, (bio)power and trust. Issues pertaining specifically to the workplace focus on the impact of remote work, including the challenge of building cohesive work relations and managing cultural difference, distance recruitment, the new forms of professional online communication, the future of the remote work model and questions of identity that are underpinned by the culture of professions. It aims to theoretically inform some of the enormous changes which have been brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic at multiple levels of our professional and social lives. It concludes with a virtual round-table discussion on the question of cultural difference with respect to both the pandemic itself and work practice. COVID-19, Communication and Culture: Beyond the Global Workplace will be of great interest to academics and professionals interested in the communication and discourse and the cultural impact of COVID-19.
Book Synopsis Global Health, Humanity and the COVID-19 Pandemic by : Francis Egbokhare
Download or read book Global Health, Humanity and the COVID-19 Pandemic written by Francis Egbokhare and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2023-02-24 with total page 498 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume interrogates global health and especially the scourge of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the role that science has played in mitigating the human experiences of pandemics and health over the centuries. Science, and the scientific method, has always been at the forefront of the human attempt at undermining the virulent consequences of sicknesses and diseases. However, the scientific image of humans in the world is founded on the presumption of possessing the complete understanding about humans and their physiological and psychological frameworks. This volume challenges this scientific assumption. Global health denotes the complex and cumulative health profile of humanity that involves not only the framework of scientific researches and practices that investigates and seeks to improve the health of all people on the globe, but also the range of humanistic issues - economic, cultural, social, ideological - that constitute the sources of inequities and threat to the achievement of a positive global health profile. This volume balances the argument that diseases and pandemics are human problems that demand both scientific and humanistic interventions.
Book Synopsis COVID Communication by : Douglas A. Vakoch
Download or read book COVID Communication written by Douglas A. Vakoch and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2023-05-30 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book focuses on how we understand COVID-19—medically, socially, and rhetorically. Given the expectation that other flu pandemics will occur, it stresses the importance of examining how the public response is shaped in the face of global health emergencies. It considers questions such as how can pandemic language both limit and expand our understanding of disease as biomedical, social, and experiential? In what ways can health communication be improved through the study and application of rhetoric and the health humanities? COVID Communication fills a gap in the pandemic literature by promoting interdisciplinary analysis of communication methods, realized through a health humanities approach. It centers human experience and culture within conversations about the biological reality of a pandemic. This volume will be a welcome contribution to the scientific investigations and practice of psychology and public health professionals. Interdisciplinary perspective New insights on how a pandemic is understood Highlights the relevance to important usually neglected relevance for psychology and public health professionals Endorsements of COVID Communication “In an era of the COVID-19 pandemic crisis, COVID Communication provides a smart, urgent alternative to our collective downward spiral, not only offering a fiery critique of our selfish and self-destructive present but also providing galvanizing, positive visions of what futures we might hope for.” — Shailendra Saxena, King George’s Medical University, India; editor of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19): Epidemiology, Pathogenesis, Diagnosis, and Therapeutics “COVID Communication shows that the pandemic affects us not only because it makes us sick or ruins our economy, but also because of how it is spoken, written, and thought about, ultimately because of how it is socially constructed. An original and very necessary look to arm ourselves intellectually against the pandemic.” — Alberto del Campo Tejedor, Pablo de Olavide University, Spain; author of La infame fama del andaluz “The COVID-19 pandemic represented a global challenge that needed nations and their people to come together, find a joint response, and build a narrative that was clear, consistent, inclusive, and respectful of people. The reality, however, is that the responses to the pandemic reflected the ideologies of national leaders, political leaders, media outlets, and activists, leading to a fragmented and at times polarized global discourse. This important work examines the different narratives that circulated within the information environment to explore how these may have led to differing levels of trust in politicians, in science, and in one another. Through an analysis of rhetoric across diverse nations and platforms, the chapters provide a framework that is crucial for understanding the interplay between discourse, cognition, and behavior.” — Darren Lilleker, Bournemouth University, UK; co-editor of Political Communication and COVID-19: Governance and Rhetoric in Times of Crisis “This book presents a collection of must-read scholarly chapters that illustrate a panoramic view of how people from different countries and cultures communicate about this global pandemic. These chapters paint a rich canvas of thoughts, emotions, reactions, and actions through communication expressions, ranging from intuitive rhetoric and probing cartoons to emotional memes and creative advertising. The book is a great resource for aiding health communication scholars, instructors, professionals, journalists, and students in enhancing their COVID-19 research, teaching, practice, reporting, and learning.” — Carolyn A. Lin, University of Connecticut, USA; co-editor of Communication Technology and Social Change: Theory and Implications “In an era of cultural anxiety caused by the global pandemic and social unrest, COVID Communication could not be timelier. Presenting broad cross-cultural and multi-modal perspectives on media portrayals of the illness that has caused so much suffering and uncertainty, this insightful book offers a ‘rhetorical toolkit’ that gives us tools to navigate the maze of modern communication with a deeper understanding of the power of language in the time of social media. It is a perfect resource for classes on media literacy, while it is useful to anyone who wants to become a more active, independent, and secure consumer of the media in the age of information abundance.” — Katja Plemenitaš, University of Maribor, Slovenia; co-author of Josip Hutter and the Dwelling Culture of Maribor “COVID-19, as a disaster and series of converging crises, has forever shaped society. COVID Communication offers an easy-to-read, unparalleled academic-practitioner focus to help understand the cultural, social, economic, political, community health, and personal risk assessment aspects of communication during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. Together, in a ground- breaking analysis that enhances the rich intellectual tradition of the field of communications, each chapter in COVID Communication offers readers the opportunity to view multiple media sources and approaches that engender a deeper understanding of health information and communication during and after COVID-19 and its ensuing crises.” — DeMond S. Miller, Rowan University, USA; co-editor of Community Disaster Recovery and Resiliency: Exploring Global Opportunities and Challenges “With its twenty-one chapters exploring a wide spectrum of issues ranging from individual and social responses to the global coronavirus breakout to the divergent narrative patterns identified from various countries, COVID Communication is indeed a timely and significant guide to understanding the recent pandemic. The collection makes the reader realize and acknowledge the multitude of complex, intersecting factors and processes that are relevant to comprehend the coronavirus pandemic and to cope with its various representations.” — Şemsettin Tabur, Ankara Yildirim Beyazit University, Turkey; author of Contested Spaces in Contemporary North American Novels: Reading for Space
Book Synopsis Creative Resilience and COVID-19 by : Irene Gammel
Download or read book Creative Resilience and COVID-19 written by Irene Gammel and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2022-03-20 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Creative Resilience and COVID-19 examines arts, culture, and everyday life as a way of navigating through and past COVID-19. Drawing together the voices of international experts and emerging scholars, this volume explores themes of creativity and resilience in relation to the crisis, trauma, cultural alterity, and social change wrought by the pandemic. The cultural, social, and political concerns that have arisen due to COVID-19 are inextricably intertwined with the ways the pandemic has been discussed, represented, and visualized in global media. The essays included in this volume are concerned with how artists, writers, and advocates uncover the hope, plasticity, and empowerment evident in periods of worldwide loss and struggle—factors which are critical to both overcoming the COVID-19 pandemic and fashioning the post-COVID-19 era. Elaborating on concepts of the everyday and the outbreak narrative, Creative Resilience and COVID-19 explores diverse themes including coping with the crisis through digital distractions, diary writing, and sounds; the unequal vulnerabilities of gender, ethnicity, and age; the role of visuality and creativity including comics and community theatre; and the hopeful vision for the future through urban placemaking, nighttime sociability, and cinema. The book fills an important scholarly gap, providing foundational knowledge from the frontlines of the COVID-19 pandemic through a consideration of the arts, humanities, and social sciences. In doing so, Creative Resilience and COVID-19 expands non-medical COVID-19 studies at the intersection of media and communication studies, cultural criticism, and the pandemic.
Book Synopsis Touch in the Time of Corona by : Henriette Steiner
Download or read book Touch in the Time of Corona written by Henriette Steiner and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2021-09-20 with total page 191 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A chronicle, a memoir, a reflection on the pandemic, and a cultural analysis of the new spatial, social, and epistemological forms that have arisen with it, this volume weaves together cultural history, aesthetics, and urban and digital studies. It looks at the particular ways in which the possibilities for touch, touching and being touched, both physically and affectively, are reconfigured by the pandemic. How are love, care, and humanity’s complex relationships with technology and nature played out in the interval between abandoned city centres and digitally mediated gatherings? How can we comprehend the reconfiguration of relationships through the human response to the pandemic as an experience that concerns us all but affects each of us in different ways? How do we think through the technological and material dependencies that the pandemic situation establishes? And how does this allow us to imagine the world beyond the pandemic—both utopian and dystopian? The essays in this book explore the new forms of intimacy and distance that are developing in the wake of COVID-19, offering a distinctive, topical analysis in the fields of urban and digital studies.
Book Synopsis The Pandemic Perhaps by : Carlo Caduff
Download or read book The Pandemic Perhaps written by Carlo Caduff and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2015-08-11 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 2005, American experts sent out urgent warnings throughout the country: a devastating flu pandemic was fast approaching. Influenza was a serious disease, not a seasonal nuisance; it could kill millions of people. If urgent steps were not taken immediately, the pandemic could shut down the economy and “trigger a reaction that will change the world overnight.” The Pandemic Perhaps explores how American experts framed a catastrophe that never occurred. The urgent threat that was presented to the public produced a profound sense of insecurity, prompting a systematic effort to prepare the population for the coming plague. But when that plague did not arrive, the race to avert it carried on. Paradoxically, it was the absence of disease that made preparedness a permanent project. The Pandemic Perhaps tells the story of what happened when nothing really happened. Drawing on fieldwork among scientists and public health professionals in New York City, the book is an investigation of how actors and institutions produced a scene of extreme expectation through the circulation of dramatic plague visions. It argues that experts deployed these visions to draw attention to the possibility of a pandemic, frame the disease as a catastrophic event, and make it meaningful to the nation. Today, when we talk about pandemic influenza, we must always say “perhaps.” What, then, does it mean to engage a disease in the modality of the maybe?
