Viral/Vital Conditions: Living in a World Increasingly Shaped by Multiple Meanings of Virality

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.

Watch The Virus Touch with Professor Bishnupriya Ghosh here:

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

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.  

This signature on the soundstage event featuring Steven Thrasher, acclaimed author, professor, journalist and inaugural Daniel H. Renberg Chair of Social Justice in Reporting at Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism was held on March 22, 2023.

Thrasher was in conversation with moderators Carlos Decena and Donna Murch, with a focus on his upcoming book: The Viral Underclass: The Human Toll When Inequality and Disease Collide.

This event was part of the ongoing Viral/Vital Conditions Series at ISGRJ-New Brunswick.

About the Featured Speakers:

Steven W. Thrasher holds the inaugural Daniel Renberg Chair at Northwestern's Medill School, the first journalism professorship anywhere to focus on LGBTQ research. He is also on the faculty of Northwestern's Institute of Sexual and Gender Minority Health and Wellbeing. An interdisciplinary scholar, Dr. Thrasher is an internationally recognized expert on race, social epidemiology, and the criminalization of disease who has addressed universities and medical institutions around the world. In 2020, he served as a national surrogate to presidential candidate Senator Bernie Sanders, advising the campaign on its healthcare policies. He has written about the HIV/AIDS, Covid-19 and monkeypox epidemics for the New York Times. Guardian, Atlantic, and BuzzFeed News, as well as in numerous scholarly journals. His first book, The Viral Underclass: The Human Toll When Inequality and Disease Collide, was published in August, 2022 by Celadon Books and Macmillan Publishing to wide acclaim. The book has received starred reviews from Kirkus Reviews, Booklist and Publishers Weekly; was named one of the Best Books of August by Apple and Amazon; was named one of the Best Politics and Current Affairs Books of the fall by Publishers Weekly; was named a "must read" editors' pick by USA Today; is a finalist for the 2022 POZ Best in Literature award, for the best depictions of HIV/AIDS in literature; and, is a longlist finalist for the American Library Association's 2023 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction Literature. Dr. Thrasher holds a PhD in American Studies.

Moderators:

Carlos Decena, PhD, is the Cross-Campus Director of Undergraduate Intellectual Life and Associate Director of the Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice at Rutgers University–New Brunswick. 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.

Donna Murch is Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University, where she is Chapter President of the New Brunswick chapter of Rutgers AAUP AFT. Her newest book, Assata Taught Me: State Violence, Racial Capitalism, and the Movement for Black Lives was published by Haymarket Books in March 2022. In October 2010, Murch published Living for the City: Migration, Education and the Rise of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California with the University of North Carolina Press, which won the Phillis Wheatley prize in December 2011. Professor Murch is currently completing a new trade press book entitled Capitalism Plus Dope: Policing the Crisis and the War on Drugs in Los Angeles. She has written for the Sunday Washington Post, Guardian, New Republic, Nation, Boston Review, Jacobin, Black Scholar, Souls, the Journal of Urban History, Journal of American History, Perspectives and New Politics and appeared on BBC, CNN, Democracy Now and in Stanley Nelson’s documentary, Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution and Sam Pollard’s MLK/FBI.  

Our opening hybrid event celebrates World AIDS Day, as we are living the AIDS epidemic in a world now also shaped by COVID-19 and the recent spread of Monkeypox. Our panel consisting of students, artists and activist veterans of the AIDS, COVID-19 and Monkeypox crises will consider the long-historical dimensions and practicality of living in a world increasingly shaped by multiple meanings of virality.

Watch the livestream of the event here: