Cultural Politics of COVID-19
Product details
- ISBN 9781032315850
- Weight: 740g
- Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 27 May 2024
- Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
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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.
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
