Download or read book Human Extinction and the Pandemic Imaginary written by Christos Lynteris and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-09-19 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book develops an examination and critique of human extinction as a result of the ‘next pandemic’ and turns attention towards the role of pandemic catastrophe in the renegotiation of what it means to be human. Nested in debates in anthropology, philosophy, social theory and global health, the book argues that fear of and fascination with the ‘next pandemic’ stem not so much from an anticipation of a biological extinction of the human species, as from an expectation of the loss of mastery over human/non-humanl relations. Christos Lynteris employs the notion of the ‘pandemic imaginary’ in order to understand the way in which pandemic-borne human extinction refashions our understanding of humanity and its place in the world. The book challenges us to think how cosmological, aesthetic, ontological and political aspects of pandemic catastrophe are intertwined. The chapters examine the vital entanglement of epidemiological studies, popular culture, modes of scientific visualisation, and pandemic preparedness campaigns. This volume will be relevant for scholars and advanced students of anthropology as well as global health, and for many others interested in catastrophe, the ‘end of the world’ and the (post)apocalyptic.
Download or read book Spillover Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic written by David Quammen and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2012-10 with total page 591 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A masterpiece of science reporting that tracks the animal origins of emerginghuman diseases.
Download or read book Framing Animals as Epidemic Villains written by Christos Lynteris and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2019-10-11 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book takes a historical and anthropological approach to understanding how non-human hosts and vectors of diseases are understood, at a time when emerging infectious diseases are one of the central concerns of global health. The volume critically examines the ways in which animals have come to be framed as ‘epidemic villains’ since the turn of the nineteenth century. Providing epistemological and social histories of non-human epidemic blame, as well as ethnographic perspectives on its recent manifestations, the essays explore this cornerstone of modern epidemiology and public health alongside its continuing importance in today’s world. Covering diverse regions, the book argues that framing animals as spreaders and reservoirs of infectious diseases – from plague to rabies to Ebola – is an integral aspect not only to scientific breakthroughs but also to the ideological and biopolitical apparatus of modern medicine. As the first book to consider the impact of the image of non-human disease hosts and vectors on medicine and public health, it offers a major contribution to our understanding of human-animal interaction under the shadow of global epidemic threat.
Download or read book Diseased Cinema written by Robert Alpert and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2023-09-29 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Discusses how the depiction of diseases in movies has changed over the last century and what these changes reveal about American culture Examines disease movies as a genre that has emerged over the last century and includes pandemic and zombie films Reveals the changes to the genre’s narratives over three broad time periods: the beginning of film through the 1980s, the 1990s through the mid-2000s, and the late 2000s and afterward Investigates the evolution of disease movies through three perspectives: historically notable films, remakes, and franchises Analyses disease movies in the context of the development of American, global capitalism and the fragmentation of the social contract Explains the role of disease movie narratives in the American experience of Covid American movies about infectious diseases have reflected and driven dominant cultural narratives during the past century. These movies – both real pandemics and imagined zombie outbreaks – have become wildly popular since the beginning of the 21st century. They have shifted from featuring a contained outbreak to an imagined containment of a known disease to a globalized, uncontainable pandemic of an unknown origin. Movie narratives have changed from identifying and solving social problems to a despair and acceptance of America’s failure to fulfil its historic social contract. Movies reflect and drive developments in American capitalism that increasingly advocates for individuals and their families, rather than communities and the public good. Disease movies today minimize human differences and envisage a utopian new world order to advance the needs of contemporary American capitalism. These movie narratives shaped reactions to the outbreak of Covid and reinforced individual responsibility as the solution to end the pandemic.
Download or read book A Criminology of the Human Species written by Yarin Eski and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2023-07-10 with total page 151 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book sketches out how the criminological lens could be used in the climate change debate around possible human extinction. It explores the extent to which the human species can be considered deviant in relation to other species of the contemporary biosphere, as humans seem to be the only species on Earth that does not live in natural balance with their environment (anymore). It discusses several unsettling topics in the public debate on climate change, specifically the taboo of how humans may not survive the ongoing climate change. It includes chapters on the Earth’s history of mass-extinctions, the global state of denial including toward the possibility that the human species could go extinct, and it considers humans' future as a deviant, fatal species outside of Earth, in outer-space, possibly on other planets. It puts forward and enriches the critical criminological tradition by conceptualizing and setting an unsettling tone within criminology and criminological research on the human species and our extinction, by daring criminologists (and victimologists) to ponder and seek empirical answers to controversial imaginations and questions about our possible extinction.
Download or read book The Emerald Handbook of the Sociology of Emotions for a Post Pandemic World written by Paul R. Ward and published by Emerald Group Publishing. This book was released on 2023-04-14 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Emerald Handbook of the Sociology of Emotions for a Post-Pandemic World offers a sociological examination of the lived impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic through culture(s) of emotion, offering a refreshing contribution to a new and exciting sub-discipline.
Download or read book Rural Disease Knowledge written by Matheus Alves Duarte da Silva and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-10-07 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rural Disease Knowledge examines the ways in which knowledge of rural spaces and environments, on the one hand, and infectious diseases, on the other, have become inter-constituted since the late nineteenth century. With contributions by leading anthropologists and historians of medicine, it examines the epistemic co-constitution of the rural and of infectious diseases. Ranging from Brazil, Argentina, and Colombia to Java, Tanzania, West and South Africa, and Britain, the chapters cover diverse geographies, timelines, and diseases, including plague, brucellosis, leishmaniasis, yaws, yellow fever, nagana, sleeping sickness, and Chagas disease. The book considers how human interactions with infectious diseases have impacted ways of knowing and acting on rural spaces and environments, and in turn how human interactions with rural spaces and environments have impacted ways of knowing and acting against infectious diseases. It reflects on how the rural has been configured as a space of either health or sickness over the centuries and around the globe, the role of rural landscapes in the epistemic emergence of microbiology and tropical medicine, and the interaction with global processes such as European imperialism, the emergence of capitalism, and postcolonial nation-building projects. The studies engage with current debates on decolonizing knowledge and highlight how local disease knowledge has troubled and unsettled hegemonic medical perspectives and created new ways of understanding the relationship between diseases and rural spaces and environments. The volume will be of particular interest to scholars of medical anthropology, global health, and the history of medicine.
Download or read book Catastrophic Thinking written by David Sepkoski and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2023-12-06 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A history of scientific ideas about extinction that explains why we learned to value diversity as a precious resource at the same time as we learned to “think catastrophically” about extinction. We live in an age in which we are repeatedly reminded—by scientists, by the media, by popular culture—of the looming threat of mass extinction. We’re told that human activity is currently producing a sixth mass extinction, perhaps of even greater magnitude than the five previous geological catastrophes that drastically altered life on Earth. Indeed, there is a very real concern that the human species may itself be poised to go the way of the dinosaurs, victims of the most recent mass extinction some 65 million years ago. How we interpret the causes and consequences of extinction and their ensuing moral imperatives is deeply embedded in the cultural values of any given historical moment. And, as David Sepkoski reveals, the history of scientific ideas about extinction over the past two hundred years—as both a past and a current process—is implicated in major changes in the way Western society has approached biological and cultural diversity. It seems self-evident to most of us that diverse ecosystems and societies are intrinsically valuable, but the current fascination with diversity is a relatively recent phenomenon. In fact, the way we value diversity depends crucially on our sense that it is precarious—that it is something actively threatened, and that its loss could have profound consequences. In Catastrophic Thinking, Sepkoski uncovers how and why we learned to value diversity as a precious resource at the same time as we learned to think catastrophically about extinction.
Download or read book Knowing COVID 19 written by Fred Cooper and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2024-05-28 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Knowing COVID-19 demonstrates how researchers in the humanities shone a light on some of the many hidden problems of COVID-19, in the very depths of the pandemic crisis. Drawing on eight COVID-19 research projects, the volume shows how humanities researchers, alongside colleagues in the clinical and life sciences, addressed some of the major critical unknowns about this new infectious disease – from the effects of racism to the risks of deploying shame; from how to design an effective instructional leaflet to how to communicate effectively to bus passengers. Across eight novel case studies, the book showcases how humanities research during a pandemic is not only about interpreting the crisis when it has safely passed, but how it can play a vital, collaborative and instrumental role as events are still unfolding.
Download or read book Visual Plague written by Christos Lynteris and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2022-10-25 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How epidemic photography during a global pandemic of bubonic plague contributed to the development of modern epidemiology and our concept of the “pandemic.” In Visual Plague, Christos Lynteris examines the emergence of epidemic photography during the third plague pandemic (1894–1959), a global pandemic of bubonic plague that led to over twelve million deaths. Unlike medical photography, epidemic photography was not exclusively, or even primarily, concerned with exposing the patient’s body or medical examinations and operations. Instead, it played a key role in reconceptualizing infectious diseases by visualizing the “pandemic” as a new concept and structure of experience—one that frames and responds to the smallest local outbreak of an infectious disease as an event of global importance and consequence. As the third plague pandemic struck more and more countries, the international circulation of plague photographs in the press generated an unprecedented spectacle of imminent global threat. Nothing contributed to this sense of global interconnectedness, anticipation, and fear more than photography. Exploring the impact of epidemic photography at the time of its emergence, Lynteris highlights its entanglement with colonial politics, epistemologies, and aesthetics, as well as with major shifts in epidemiological thinking and public health practice. He explores the characteristics, uses, and impact of epidemic photography and how it differs from the general corpus of medical photography. The new photography was used not simply to visualize or illustrate a pandemic, but to articulate, respond to, and unsettle key questions of epidemiology and epidemic control, as well as to foster the notion of the “pandemic,” which continues to affect our lives today.
Download or read book Making the Human written by Corinne Mitsuye Sugino and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2024-11-15 with total page 147 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the debate over affirmative action to the increasingly visible racism amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, Asian Americans have emerged as key figures in a number of contemporary social controversies. In Making the Human: Race, Allegory, and Asian Americans, Corinne Mitsuye Sugino offers the lens of racial allegory to consider how media, institutional, and cultural narratives mobilize difference to normalize a white, Western conception of the human. Rather than focusing on a singular arena of society, Sugino considers contemporary sources across media, law, and popular culture to understand how they interact as dynamic sites of meaning-making. Drawing on scholarship in Asian American studies, Black studies, cultural studies, communication, and gender and sexuality studies, Sugino argues that Asian American racialization and gendering plays a key role in shoring up abstract concepts such as “meritocracy,” “family,” “justice,” “diversity,” and “nation” in ways that naturalize hierarchy. In doing so, Making the Human grapples with anti-Asian racism’s entanglements with colonialism, antiblackness, capitalism, and gendered violence.
Download or read book Routledge Handbook of Chinese Medicine written by Vivienne Lo and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-06-20 with total page 796 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Routledge Handbook of Chinese Medicine is an extensive, interdisciplinary guide to the nature of traditional medicine and healing in the Chinese cultural region, and its plural epistemologies. Established experts and the next generation of scholars interpret the ways in which Chinese medicine has been understood and portrayed from the beginning of the empire (third century BCE) to the globalisation of Chinese products and practices in the present day, taking in subjects from ancient medical writings to therapeutic movement, to talismans for healing and traditional medicines that have inspired global solutions to contemporary epidemics. The volume is divided into seven parts: Longue Durée and Formation of Institutions and Traditions Sickness and Healing Food and Sex Spiritual and Orthodox Religious Practices The World of Sinographic Medicine Wider Diasporas Negotiating Modernity This handbook therefore introduces the broad range of ideas and techniques that comprise pre-modern medicine in China, and the historiographical and ethnographic approaches that have illuminated them. It will prove a useful resource to students and scholars of Chinese studies, and the history of medicine and anthropology. It will also be of interest to practitioners, patients and specialists wishing to refresh their knowledge with the latest developments in the field. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license
Download or read book Global Pandemics and Epistemic Crises in Psychology written by Martin Dege and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-07-22 with total page 132 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Using COVID-19 as a base, this groundbreaking book brings together several renowned scholars to explore the concept of crisis, and how this global event has shaped the discipline of psychology. It engages directly with the challenges that psychology continues to face when theorizing societal issues of gender, race, class, history, and culture, while not disregarding "lived" experiences. This edited volume offers a set of pathways to rethink psychology beyond its current scope and history to become more apt to the conditions, needs, and demands of the 21st century. The book explores topics like resilience, interpersonal relationships, mistrust in the government, and access to healthcare. Dividing the book into three distinct sections, the contributors first examine the current crisis within psychology, then go on to explore how psychology theorizes the subject and the other in a social world of perpetual political, economic, cultural, and social crises, and lastly consider the role of crises in the creation of new theorizing. This is essential reading for advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students of theoretical and philosophical psychology, social psychology, community psychology, and developmental psychology.
Download or read book Planetary Health Humanities and Pandemics written by Heike Härting and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-03-29 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume explores the variable meanings and discourses of historical and contemporary pandemics to rethink theories and practices of planetary health. Rather than conflating the planetary with anthropogenic climate change, planetary geo-engineering, or the "global," the volume elaborates a version of planetary health humanities that invites decolonial, creative, and pluridisciplinary modes of thinking and sees "health" as a complex non-anthropocentric process that moves within the multiple scales of the planetary. The volume offers new historical trajectories as it considers an eighteenth-century woman author’s readings of plague, intersecting narratives of nineteenth-century lactation and vaccination, and the forgotten biopolitics of NASA’s Planetary Quarantine Program. It offers accounts of decolonial and oracular planetary health, insists that the role of literature in the health humanities is not merely instrumental, explores viral and planetary co-inhabitations, and scrutinizes inequities faced by global health workers. The volume also includes discussions of cybernetic addiction and the complex entanglements of humans, microbes, and bees. Its concluding interview addresses the concrete impact of current planetary transformations on individual and collective health. Bringing together multiple disciplines, the volume will be of interest to students and scholars in health humanities, literary studies, postcolonial studies, medical history, and narrative medicine.
Download or read book How to Live Through a Pandemic written by Simone Abram and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-09-14 with total page 165 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores what anthropology can contribute to an understanding of how people live through pandemics. It reflects on how pandemics are experienced and what we can learn from Covid-19 as well as previous instances that might inform future responses and help to alleviate suffering. The chapters highlight current research and longer-term reflections from different countries and areas of the discipline, covering medical anthropology, care and surveillance, digital and experimental ethnography, and the everyday economies of lockdown. They show the breadth and originality of anthropological work relevant to thinking about and responding to pandemic situations. Extending beyond Covid-19, the volume considers the implications for ongoing and future research under pandemic restrictions and gives a broad overview of current anthropology relevant to questions about pandemics. It will be of interest to both academic and applied anthropologists, as well as to sociologists and those working in global and public health.
Download or read book Senses of the Future written by Gerard Delanty and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2024-03-04 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The future has become a problem for the present. Almost every critical issue is now understood and experienced through the prism of the future since this is the primary focus for the playing out of crises. Senses of the Future offers a wide-ranging discussion of theories of the future. It covers the main ideas of the future in modern thought and explores how we should view the future today in light of a plurality of very different and conflicting visions. The key contribution of this book is to bring together the different approaches with an account that is grounded in sociological and philosophical analysis as opposed to visions of the future that are inspired by extreme visions of catastrophe or approaches that see the future as only the continuation of the present. Given a revival of apocalyptical visions of the ‘end times’ and dystopian views of the future of human societies, there is urgent need for a new approach on how we should imagine the future. The author explores the future as a field of tensions that is revealed in narratives, utopian desires, hope, imaginaries, and social struggles concerning the potential possibilities of the present: the future does not just arrive; it has to be fought for. This book is an important contribution to a critical sociology of the future. It is both a work of reconstruction and critique grounded in a historical and philosophical hermeneutics of the future. Table of Contents Chapter One Introduction: Conflicting Visions of the Future Contested Visions of the Future Today Return to the Future Outline of the Chapters References Chapter Two When is the Future? The Problem of Time and the Human Condition Time in the Physical World: Lessons from Physics Has the Future already Begun? Time and History Time, Life, and the Human Condition: Biology, Evolution, and Culture Conclusion References Chapter Three Lessons from the Past: What Does the Past Tell Us about the Future? The Future in the Past Failed Societies and Civilizational Collapse Catastrophes and History Conclusion References Chapter Four Modernity and the Concept of the Future: Utopia, Progress, and Prophecy The Future as Expectation The Future as an Imaginary and the Emergence of Utopianism The Future as Possibility The Future as Experience Conclusion References Chapter Five Ideas of the Future in the Twentieth Century: Futurism, Modernism, Sociology, and Political Theory New Political Ideas of the Future after 1945 Responses to the Future: From Fear of the Future to Futurology Sociological Theory and the Future Conclusion: The New Sociology of the Future References Chapter Six Critical Theory and the Future: The Sources of Transcendence The Intellectual Origins of Critical Theory: A Brief Outline The Idea of the Future in the Critical Theory of the Early Frankfurt School Habermas and the Communication Paradigm The Responsibility Paradigm and Cosmopolitanism: Jonas and Apel Critical Cosmopolitanism and the Idea of the Future Conclusion: Cultural Models and the Future as Possibility References Chapter Seven Conclusion: In The Shadow of the Future Do We Need a Theory of the Future? Are we already in a New Historical Era? AI and a Posthuman Future Struggles for the Future References Index
Download or read book Viral Behaviors written by Roberta Buiani and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2024-08-22 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a new era of global virology that requires novel methodologies to improve the comprehension of viruses and viral phenomena, Viral Behaviors explores the cultural, material, and artistic significance of viral agents. Across a rich variety of case studies stemming from different areas of interest-covering literature, the graphic arts and scientific visualization, as well as performance, installation and bioart-this book asks whether embracing the complexity of viruses, rather than obsessively measuring, dissecting, or precisely mapping their parts and manifestations, may provide new methodological directions in the intersection of scientific thinking and artistic practice. The book examines the struggles and successes of science and technology to tame the elusive nature and behavior of viruses, and the potential of art-based and cross-disciplinary collaborations to better communicate their complex making and intense entanglement with the world at large. Combining perspectives from art, philosophy, science and technology, it places biological and informational viruses alongside each other, revealing that, while the two types of agents affect the world in very different ways, their histories and manifestations contain surprising similarities that speak to a cultural continuum. Viral Behaviors unravels the extraordinary mobility of viruses across disciplines, and their intersection with all aspects of culture, rather than their import within one specific disciplinary realm. It shows how the numerous attempts by artists, scientists and professionals to tackle, represent and appropriate viruses, and their intricate dynamism, can lead to new nuanced and sophisticated understandings of these substances and their related phenomena, and reveals the contribution of non-measurable or non-traditional practices in their construction and dissemination.
