Pandemics and the Media

Marina Levina (PhD, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) is Assistant Professor of Communication at the University of Memphis. She is co-editor of Monster Culture in the 21st Century: A Reader (2013) and Post-Global Network and Everyday Life (2012).

• Contents: Keeping the Blood Flowing: Disease, Community, and Public Imaginaries – HIV/AIDS and Mediated Narratives of Morality and Citizenship –Vampires and HIV/AIDS in the Popular Imagination – Globalization, Pandemics, and the Problem of Security – Zombie Pandemic and Governance of Life Itself – Pandemics and Digital Media Technologies.

«‘Pandemics and the Media’ deftly examines the intersection of politics, popular culture, economics, and technology to provide insight into the global preoccupation with pandemics. Marina Levina­ investigates the moral implications and cautionary tales underwriting fears of contamination, carefully scrutinizing how meaning is crafted and circulated through various media. The provocative case studies explore everything from the promiscuous bites of vampires to the geopolitical panic of zombie narratives to the fragility of national security in popular films about contagions.» (Jeffrey Bennett, author of ‘Banning Queer Blood: Rhetorics of Citizenship, Contagion, and Resistance’)«In this exceptionally well-researched and thoughtful book, Marina Levina reminds us that pandemics tell us as much about culture, economic relations, and political commitments as they do about any ‘brute facts’ of the biological body. And those commitments matter. During a time when we see growing disparities in the distribution of basic material resources and when fear of contagion is used to justify policies and interventions based on implicit notions of the body as a racialized and sexualized threat, we need the kind of courageous scholarship that ‘Pandemics and the Media’ exemplifies. Levina’s intellectual engagement with our most fundamental beliefs about risk, vulnerability, the normal, and the pathological is a necessary first step toward realizing a critical, affirmative biopolitics.» (Kelly Happe, author of ‘The Material Gene: Gender, Race, and Heredity after the Human Genome Project’)