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Examining mainstream media on COVID-19 across China, Italy, the United Kingdom, and the United States, and by drawing from various critical theoretical traditions, this book seeks answers to key questions about the experience of living and dying under COVID-19.
The COVID-19 pandemic has been conceived, narrated, and visualized as a numerical crisis and a statistical exception - from the proliferation of COVID dashboards to the numbers of infections cited in news cycles, and the data literacy required to navigate the viral spread. How did these dashboards, along with other numerical images and narratives, condition the experience of living and dying under COVID-19? Is that experience still shaping how we perceive and communicate about the world today? In this book, the authors explore pandemic power - a form of power that declares the beginning and end of the pandemic as a statistically calculable exception, and that works in tandem with a Dashboard worldview. It also argues how that power dictates being-in-the-pandemic under a geospatial and biostatistical gaze, the military and political legacies of which have constructed the pandemic as we have come to know it and its persisting afterlives.
This book will benefit students, teachers, and scholars interested in media and critical studies of COVID-19, as well as anyone interested in the political theorization of the changing forms of power during and after the pandemic.
List of contents
Introduction. Chapter I. The Visual Culture of the Pandemic. Chapter II. A Media Phenomenology of the Pandemic. Chapter III. A Numerical Ontology of the Pandemic. Chapter IV. The Apparatus of Global Numeration. Chapter V. Genealogies and Practices of Pandemic Power. Chapter VI. The Pandemic Condition. Conclusion: Numbers and Ashes.
About the author
Giovanna Borradori is a Professor of Philosophy and Media Studies at Vassar College, USA. Her scholarship has investigated the relationship between aesthetics and politics, with particular attention to the visual cultures of neoliberalism, terrorism and collective memory, the philosophy of photography, the phenomenology of new media, the colonial and postcolonial imagination. Her
Philosophy in the Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida (2003) was the first philosophical examination of the events of September 11, 2001, and the geopolitical transformation that followed. Translated into 22 languages, this book generated the historical rapprochement between Critical Theory and deconstruction.
Ruoyu Li is an Assistant Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies at Colgate University, USA. She was a Henry A. Kissinger Predoctoral Fellow at the Jackson School of Global Affairs at Yale University (2024-2025). Her research focuses on US nuclear testing in the Pacific Ocean, captured at the intersection of Critical International Relations, Pacific Studies, and Science and Technology Studies. Her articles have appeared on Security Studies and International Politics.
