The Virus Touch

Welcome to the Global Media & Communication podcast series. This podcast is a multimodal project powered by the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication (CARGC) at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. At CARGC, we produce and promote critical, interdisciplinary, and multimodal research on global media and communication. We aim to bridge academic scholarship and public life, bringing the best scholarship to bear on enduring global questions and pressing contemporary issues.

In this episode, Professor Bishnupriya Ghosh joins our host, Zehra Husain, to discuss her latest book, The Virus Touch: Theorizing Epidemic Media (Duke UP, 2023).

Over the course of the interview, you’ll learn about:

• The origins of the book and how Ghosh became interested in the body as a material medium
• The importance of conceptualizing global epidemics in multiscalar ways
• What Ghosh means by multispecies relationality and “lively media”
• The distinctions between the “global” and the “planetary”
• Ghosh’s research process for the book and her thoughts on using an ethnographic mode
• The media archive Ghosh assembled while conducting research for the book
• How and why Ghosh conceptualizes blood as media in the book
• The expansive sites, scales, and temporalities that Ghosh tracks across The Virus Touch

…and much more!

About the book

“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.” Learn more about the book on the publisher’s website!

Guest Biography

Bishnupriya Ghosh publishes in global media cultures, environmental media, and critical health studies. Her early research includes two monographs, When Borne Across: Literary Cosmopolitics in the Contemporary Indian Novel (Rutgers UP, 2004) and Global Icons: Apertures to the Popular (Duke UP, 2011), while her current research is exemplified by the co-edited volume, The Routledge Companion to Media and Risk (Routledge 2020) and a new monograph, The Virus Touch: Theorizing Epidemic Media (Duke UP, 2023).

Host Biography

Zehra Husain is a cultural anthropologist specializing in media, race and popular culture. Her research studies people’s uptake of popular images as they shape racial subjectivities and cosmopolitan imaginaries in the Indian Ocean region. Her book manuscript project analyzes the resonances of boxing, soccer and rap music in a port neighborhood in Karachi. It traces the circulation of global African American and afro diasporic icons in national mainstream media and in people’s image-making practices. These visual and aural media, she argues, are valorized resources through which a non-elite people, many of whom are of afro-Baluch descent, draw resonances and similarities between seemingly unrelated contexts. In so doing, people rework racialized stigmas related to urban violence, criminality, and lower caste status and reconfigure Indian Ocean’s cosmopolitan aesthetics with global blackness. Zehra is also working on a second research project on Indian Ocean screen cultures. She has previously worked as a journalist in Karachi.

Credits

• Interview by: Zehra Husain
• Produced by: Eszter Zimanyi
• Edited by: Eszter Zimanyi and Matt Parker
• Sound mixing by: Matt Parker
• Music by: Zoe Zhao
• Blog post written by: Eszter Zimanyi