Pandemics and the Media

Offering a comprehensive analysis of mediated representations of global pandemics, this book engages with the construction, management, and classification of difference in the global context of a pandemic, to address what it means - culturally, politically, and economically - to live in an infected, diseased body. Marina Levina argues that mediated representations are essential in translating and making sense of difference as a category of subjectivity and as a mode of organizing and distributing change. Using textual analysis of media texts on pandemics and disease, she illustrates how they represent a larger mediascape that drafts stories of global instabilities and global health. Levina explains how the stories we tell about disease matter; that the media is instrumental in constructing and disseminating these stories; and that mediated narratives of pandemics are rooted in global flows of policies, commerce, and populations. Pandemics are, by definition, global crises.

Autorentext

Marina Levina (PhD, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) is Assistant Professor of Communication at the University of Memphis. She is co-editor of Monster Culture in the 21st Century: A Reader (2013) and Post-Global Network and Everyday Life (2012).

Inhalt

Contents: Keeping the Blood Flowing: Disease, Community, and Public Imaginaries - HIV/AIDS and Mediated Narratives of Morality and Citizenship -Vampires and HIV/AIDS in the Popular Imagination - Globalization, Pandemics, and the Problem of Security - Zombie Pandemic and Governance of Life Itself - Pandemics and Digital Media Technologies.