Viral/Vital Series: The Virus Touch with Professor Bishnupriya Ghosh

In The Virus Touch: Theorizing Epidemic Media, Professor 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.

The Virus Touch webinar is part of the year-long Viral/Vital series presented by ISGRJ-New Brunswick.

Viral/Vital Conditions is an invitation/provocation for the Rutgers University community, featuring veterans, academics, activists, and artists engaged in deepening our collective understanding of the current COVID-19 pandemic in light of earlier pandemic outbreaks such as HIV/AIDS and Monkeypox. In a moment in which "going viral" and experiencing the collective and proximal cohabitation of a precarious world of viruses, emerging diseases, and generalized precarity, how do people, communities, and systems learn from previous experiences? What are the politics of race, class, materiality, and representation in fashioning capacious futures for the most vulnerable among us?

The events in the Viral/Vital Series aim to bring attention to these interconnections and bridges linking our past and present for the sake of drawing lessons toward viable futures for all. 

Watch the conversation here:

About the speaker:

Professor Bishnupriya Ghosh teaches in global media at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her recent work is on media, risk, and globalization: the co-edited Routledge Companion to Media and Risk (Routledge 2020) and a new monograph on viral pandemics, The Virus Touch: Theorizing Epidemic Media (Duke University Press, 2023). She is starting research on media environments of viral infection in a book of essays tentatively titled Epidemic Intensities. 

About the moderators:

Carlos Ulises Decena, PhD, is the Interim Campus Director at the Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice at Rutgers University–New Brunswick and the Cross-Campus Director of Undergraduate Intellectual Life. He is also Professor of Latino and Caribbean Studies and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Rutgers University–New Brunswick. Decena is an interdisciplinary scholar, whose work straddles the humanities and social sciences and whose intellectual projects engage and blur the boundaries among critical ethnic, queer and feminist studies and social justice. His first book, Tacit Subjects: Belonging and Same-Sex Desire among Dominican Immigrant Men, was published by Duke University Press in 2011. His book, Circuits of the Sacred: A Faggotology in the Black Latinx Caribbean, was published in February, 2023 by Duke University Press.

Pato Hebert is an artist, teacher and organizer. He has worked in HIV prevention initiatives with queer communities of color since 1994. He continues these grassroots efforts at local and transnational levels, working with social movements and community organizations to develop innovative approaches to HIV mobilization, programs, advocacy and justice. He curated exhibitions and led creative initiatives at the International AIDS Conferences in Vienna (2010), Melbourne (2014), Durban (2016) and Amsterdam (2018). He is a COVID-19 long hauler, living with the impacts of the coronavirus and publicly addressing the pandemic since March of 2020. His Lingering solo exhibition about long hauling debuted at Pitzer College in 2022. He serves as Chair and an Associate Professor of Art in the Department of Art & Public Policy at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts.