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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.
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.
Join science expert Dr Ben Martynoga and illustrator extraordinaire Moose Allain on a fascinating, sometimes funny, and occasionally scary journey through the world of viruses.Explore the science behind viruses and the COVID-19 pandemic in a fascinating story of hijacked human cells and our own internal emergency services.Along the way, you'll learn what viruses are, how they work, and how we can overcome - or at least learn to live alongside - those that do us harm.
The story of a microbiologist's remarkable career, from identifying the Ebolavirus to pioneering AIDS research and policy.
Why are we stuck inside? It's so Boring!? Or is it?
Our existence is increasingly lived at a distance. As we move from flesh to image, we are in danger of losing touch with each other and ourselves. How can we combine the physical with the virtual, our embodied experience with our global connectivity? How can we come back to our senses? Richard Kearney offers a timely call for the cultivation of the basic human need to touch and be touched. He argues that touch is our most primordial sense, foundational to our individual and common selves. Kearney explores the role of touch, from ancient wisdom traditions to modern therapies. He demonstrates that a fundamental aspect of touch is interdependence, its inherently reciprocal nature, which offers a crucial corrective to our fixation with control. Making the case for the complementarity of touch and technology, this book is a passionate plea to recover a tangible sense of community and the joys of life with others.
This book provides detailed analysis of the manifold ways in which COVID-19 has influenced death, dying and bereavement. Through three parts: Reconsidering Death and Grief in Covid-19; Institutional Care and Covid-19; and the Impact of COVID-19 in Context, the book explores COVID-19 as a reminder of our own and our communities’ fragile existence, but also the driving force for discovering new ways of meaning-making, performing rites and rituals, and conceptualising death, grief and life. Contributors include scholars, researchers, policymakers and practitioners, accumulating in a multi-disciplinary, diverse and international set of ideas and perspectives that will help the reader examine closely how Covid-19 has invaded social life and (re)shaped trauma and loss. It will be of interest to all scholars and students of death studies, biomedicine, and end of life care as well as those working in sociology, social work, medicine, social policy, cultural studies, anthropology, psychology, counselling and nursing more broadly.
A leading expert answers your questions about how to live to your fullest with COPD. Significant lung damage from smoking, exposure in some jobs, or even diseases such as AIDS and tuberculosis can lead to COPD. Having chronic obstructive pulmonary disease can leave you feeling short of breath, sometimes reluctant to go shopping or for a walk because you are afraid of more difficulties. You may have wheezing, tightness in the chest, or frequent coughing. Although you see a doctor for your COPD, you often have questions and need answers. In this concise and practical guide, leading medical expert Donald A. Mahler answers some of the most pressing questions that he has been asked over 30 years of seeing patients with COPD, including • Why am I short of breath? • What medications can treat my COPD? • Can surgery improve COPD? • What are flare-ups—and how can I prevent them? • How can I stop smoking? • What should I do if my breathing isn't getting better? • Can exercise help? If so, which exercises are the most beneficial? • What's the best way to prevent lung infections? • How does COVID-19 affect COPD? • How can I travel with oxygen? • Can I be sexually active with COPD? and much more. Each chapter includes a patient vignette and key points. Tables and boxes offering helpful tips are included throughout. Providing up-to-date, evidence-based content that covers more than just medications, COPD gives you the tools you need to keep active—and thrive.
The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed and exacerbated long-standing inequities, both in the United States and throughout the world. As studies emerge to help us understand the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on every facet of modern life, it is critical that the effect of the pandemic on the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Intersexual, and Asexual (LGBTQIA+) communities not be overlooked. While some pioneering studies analyzing the impacts of the pandemic upon LGBTQIA+ communities have been conducted, and some efforts are being made to collect data which can impact the development of policy, reliable data resources are limited to a few enterprising states, and this data has not been systematically shared with public policy-makers or with the public to date. COVID-19, the LGBTQIA+ Community, and Public Policy explores precisely how the pandemic has affected these communities and what concrete steps need to be taken to ameliorate its effects. As the chapters in this book demonstrate, the unusual nature of the pandemic has significantly impacted state and local LGBTQIA+ infrastructure, leading to closure of some institutions and reductions in functioning for many others. The contributors examine the ways the pandemic has highlighted preexisting challenges on accessing adequate healthcare (including mental healthcare and substance abuse treatment), employment, education, secure housing, and other societal resources. Together, these chapters present a state-of-the-field overview of health disparities in the LGBTQIA+ community, and demonstrate the particular need for serious, timely, public policy interventions.
‘No one till now has written on the coronavirus against a cultural backdrop as vast as this—crossing centuries, continents and disciplines. This small book will outrun all the repetitive details of the pandemic with which we are being regularly bombarded’ ASHIS NANDY ‘Vinay Lal's 3-D analysis of the what and the why of the COVID experience, is a must read for grasping the finer lines of history, culture and literature invisibly woven into the global response to the pandemic’ GANESH DEVY ‘Lal writes with an ease that is a pleasure to read. This book shows how we can see ourselves in the crisis of COVID-19, in the mirrors of our common, shared but unfinished humanity’ SATENDRA NANDAN There has never been anything like the Covid-19 pandemic in history. The world as we knew it has changed and the fury of Covid-19 has unleashed new forces, leaving us with an uncertain future. Though its fatality rate, in comparison with some previous epidemics such as the Black Death and the ‘Spanish flu’ of 1918-20, is strikingly low, and though it follows in the path of epidemics such as HIV, SARS, and Ebola, the coronavirus pandemic has produced outcomes which are altogether unprecedented. There is no other instance where the world was, over three months, brought to a standstill and the global economy shuttered. Most countries imposed a ‘lockdown’ and shut down their borders. In Italy and Spain, old people were left to die; in India, millions of migrants took to the road. In some countries rulers have assumed emergency powers. America, the world’s superpower, has been brought to its knees. The economic impact of the outbreak has been shattering; the environmental implications may yet be monumental. Investigating all these trends and the social, cultural, political, and philosophical aspects and implications of the pandemic, this book evaluates the fate of humankind and the earth in its wake.