STS 237 - Theorizing Pandemic Media and Their Afterlives

Semester Offered: Spring
0.5 unit(s)

(Same as ASIA 237, MEDS 237, and PHIL 237) This course is based on a forthcoming book, Theorizing Pandemic Media and Their Afterlives, that I co-authored with Ruoyu Li, a Vassar alumna and my former student, now starting as an Assistant Professor in the Program on Peace and Conflict at Colgate University. The course begins from the observation that the COVID-19 pandemic was conceived, narrated, and visualized as a “numerical” crisis. In contrast to other pandemics (including the 1919 Spanish Influenza, which was represented as a spillover from the WWI battlefield, and HIV-AIDS, which was blamed on socially endangering behaviors), COVID-19 was hailed as an absolute statistical exception. We critically look at how the unprecedented proliferation of COVID-19 dashboards, coupled with the literacy universally required to decode their data visualizations, has conditioned the experience of living and dying under COVID-19, across different geographies, social and educational backgrounds, genders and generations, as well as political regimes. Theorizing the Dashboard as the premiere pandemic mass media enables us to analyze a new set of biopolitical practices that bestowed both care and abandonment by numerically targeting distinct populations of the world. We read the work of theorists of biopower and necropower, including Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, Roberto Esposito, and Achille Mbembe, as well as scholars such as Belinda Kong, who has claimed that “the pandemic” is the foremost bio-securitizing and bio-orientalist discourse of the third millennium, and Bishnupriya Ghosh, whose concept of epidemic media as “biotechnical forms” make viral infections not only legible but actionable. These readings not only give students the opportunity to reconnect with the most globally shared trauma of this generation, but also enable them to appraise the COVID-19 pandemic as a specific form of geospatial and biostatistical “world-making,” whose military legacies have transformed how we live and relate to each other today. Giovanna Borradori.

First six-week course.

Two 75-minute periods.

Course Format: CLS