The Cultural Politics of COVID-19

1. Auflage 2022
ISBN: 978-1-032-30186-0
Verlag: Routledge

Buch, Englisch, 442 Seiten, Format (B × H): 161 mm x 240 mm, Gewicht: 828 g

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.

Zielgruppe

Postgraduate, Undergraduate Advanced, and Undergraduate Core

Autoren/Hrsg.

Erni, John Nguyet

Striphas, Ted

Fachgebiete

• Sozialwissenschaften Medien- und Kommunikationswissenschaften Medienwissenschaften
• Sozialwissenschaften Medien- und Kommunikationswissenschaften Kommunikationswissenschaften
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Spezielle Soziologie Mediensoziologie

Inhaltsverzeichnis

1. Introduction: COVID-19, the multiplier, Racializations, 2. COVID-19 and the mundane practices of privilege, 3. Following the science? COVID-19, ‘race’ and the politics of knowing, 4. ‘Give me liberty or give me COVID!’: Anti-lockdown protests as necropopulist downsurgency, 5. Racism is a public health crisis! Black Power in the COVID-19 pandemic, 6. Asian Americans as racial contagion, 7. COVID-19 and ‘crisis as ordinary’: pathological whiteness, popular pessimism, and pre-apocalyptic cultural studies, 8. COVID-19 and the affective politics of congestion: an exploration of population density debates in Australia, 9. The long and deadly road: the COVID pandemic and Indian migrants, Media, Data, and Fragments of the Popular, 10. New normals, from talk to gesture, 11. Everyday life and the management of risky bodies in the COVID-19 era, 12. Virus government – A twenty-first-century genealogy of the ‘dusk mask’ as biopolitical technology, 13. Bio or Zoe?: dilemmas of biopolitics and data governmentality during COVID-19, 14. Predicting COVID-19: wearable technology and the politics of solutionism, 15. Learning from Lana: Netflix’s Too Hot to Handle, COVID-19, and the human-nonhuman entanglement in contemporary technoculture, 16. COVID bread-porn: social stratification through displays of self-management, 17. Parodies for a pandemic: coronavirus songs, creativity and lockdown, 18. Fashion in ‘crisis’: consumer activism and brand (ir)responsibility in lockdown, 19. Zombie capitalism and coronavirus time, 20. No time for fun: the politics of partying during a pandemic, Un/knowing the Pandemic, 21. Enduring COVID-19, nevertheless, 22. The dead-end of ad-hocracy, 23. The spectacle of competence: global pandemic and the redesign of leadership in a post neo-liberal world, 24. The epiphanic moments of COVID-19: the revelation of painful national truths, 25. Collective disorientation in the pandemic conjuncture, 26. Mistranslation as disinformation: COVID-19, global imaginaries, and self-serving cosmopolitanism, 27. Religion and urban political eco/pathology: exploring communalized coronavirus in South Asia, 28. Doing cultural studies in rough seas: the COVID-19 ocean multiple, 29. COVID-19 at sea: ‘the world as you know it no longer exists’, 30. Back to the future: lessons of a SARS hysteria for the COVID-19 pandemic, 31. Beyond the crisis: transitioning to a better world?

Über Autor(innen)

John Nguyet Erni is Dean of Humanities and Chair Professor of Cultural Studies at The Education University of Hong Kong. Previously, he was Fung Hon Chu Endowed Chair of Humanics at Hong Kong Baptist University. His most recent book is Law and Cultural Studies: A Critical Rearticulation of Human Rights.

Ted Striphas, Coeditor of the journal Cultural Studies, is Associate Professor of Media Studies, University of Colorado Boulder, USA. He is author of The Late Age of Print and of the upcoming monograph Algorithmic Culture. Twitter: @striphas