Planetary Health Humanities and Pandemics (Routledge Studies in Health Humanities)

✍ Scribed by Heike Härting (editor), Heather Meek (editor)

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2024
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 305
• Edition: 1
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

This volume explores the variable meanings and discourses of historical and contemporary pandemics to rethink theories and practices of planetary health.

Rather than conflating the planetary with anthropogenic climate change, planetary geo-engineering, or the "global," the volume elaborates a version of planetary health humanities that invites decolonial, creative, and pluridisciplinary modes of thinking and sees "health" as a complex non-anthropocentric process that moves within the multiple scales of the planetary. The volume offers new historical trajectories as it considers an eighteenth-century woman author’s readings of plague, intersecting narratives of nineteenth-century lactation and vaccination, and the forgotten biopolitics of NASA’s Planetary Quarantine Program. It offers accounts of decolonial and oracular planetary health, insists that the role of literature in the health humanities is not merely instrumental, explores viral and planetary co-inhabitations, and scrutinizes inequities faced by global health workers. The volume also includes discussions of cybernetic addiction and the complex entanglements of humans, microbes, and bees. Its concluding interview addresses the concrete impact of current planetary transformations on individual and collective health.

Bringing together multiple disciplines, the volume will be of interest to students and scholars in health humanities, literary studies, postcolonial studies, medical history, and narrative medicine.

✦ Table of Contents

Cover
Half Title
Series Information
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
List of Figures
List of Contributors
Foreword
Note
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Intersecting Narratives of Planetary Thought and Pandemics
Points of Departure: Planetary Health Humanities
Pandemics and Planetary Health Terminologies: The Anthropocene Predicament
Critical Approaches to Global Health
From the Anthropocene Predicament to Planetary Medicine(s)
Reimagining Pandemics Through the Planetary: Untidy Histories, Representations, and Technologies
Colonial Twinning, the “Pandemic Milieu,” and Narratives of Planetary Health
A Decolonial Poetics
The Planetary Subject in the “Pandemic Milieu”
Planetary Health Narratives
Notes
References
Section A Pandemic Anxieties and Historical Genealogies of Planetary Health
1 “So Spreading and Penetrating a Disease”: Margaret Cavendish’s Imaginative Landscapes of Plague
Beyond the Enlightenment: Cavendish’s Feminist Genealogy of the Planetary
Cavendish On Plague, the Human Body, and Infinite Variety
Natural Philosophy, Multidisciplinarity, and Cavendish’s Ethos of Continual Revision
The Limitations of Technology, the Merits of Metaphor, and the Impossibility of a Panacea for Plague
From the Ravages of Plague to the Rejuvenations of Nature and Narrative
Notes
References
2 Lactination: Planetary Bodies and Their Fluid Encounters in the Early Vaccination Narrative
Taking in the Animalized Other: The Cultural Appropriation of Immunization
Mammalia: Milk’s Agency in Eighteenth-Century Continental Science
The Udder and the Breast: Early Depictions of the Cowpox Pustule
Body Feeding: Transcorporeality in the Vaccination Process
Notes
References
3 Mobilizing Health Between the Global and the Planetary: Apollo 11, Airstream, and NASA’s Planetary Quarantine Program
Back Contamination and the Development of NASA’s Planetary Quarantine Program
Quarantine in Motion
Airstream Trailers: Aluminum Ambassadors of American Modernity
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
Notes
References
Section B Reading Planetary Health Narratives: Epistemology, Theory, and Practice
4 Decolonial Epi-Pathographies of Planetary Health: Tragedy, Policy, Art
Oracular Knowledge and Planetary Medicine
Prophecy and Planetary Health Policy
Decolonial Epi-Pathographies and Planetary Health Commons
Notes
References
5 Little COVID-19, All Grown Up in the Planetary: Reconsidering Health Humanities Instrumentalism in the COVID-19 Pandemic
The Health Humanities, Instrumentalism, and COVID
Creative Writing During the Dysbiosis: Who Needs Evidence?
Notes
References
6 Tiger Symmetries: Pandemic as Gift
Notes
References
7 Historicizing Planetary Health Policy: Health Work and Wages Across Global and Planetary Health
Introduction
Locating Planetary Health
Recycling Community Health: Historicizing Planetary Health Actors
Financial Grammars of Debt, Work, and Value in Planetary Health
Ethnography and the Value of Health Labor
Conclusion: Refiguring Global and Planetary Health
Notes
References
Section C Pandemic Ontologies, Body Politics, and a Planetary Health Commons
8 Contagious Bodies: A Pandemic of Racism
The Anthropocene: A Point of Departure
Colonialism and COVID-19
Contagious Others
Twin Pandemics: Racism and COVID-19
From the “Yellow Peril” to the War On Terror
Conclusion
Notes
References
9 #Zoombies: Cybernetic Trance in Pandemic Times
Devotional Compulsion
The Sacred Rectangle
The Waning of Peripheral Awareness
The (In)effectiveness of Rituals
Affective Dis/possession
#Hypnocene
Coda
Notes
References
10 Planetary Health (In)humanities: Disordering the Colony Collapse
Technologies of Mapping, the “Natural” World, and Epidemics
Colony Collapse Disorder, Expertise, and Data Regimes
BeeHero: Surveilling the Nonhuman
Mapping Nonhumans During the (In)Human
Conclusion: Planetary Health (In)humanities
Notes
References
11 Narrating the Uncanny Triad: Imagining Microbe, Animal, and Human Entanglements Within the Planetary Health Humanities
Introduction
The Pandemic Triad, Past and Present
Microbes
Animals
Humans
Reimagining the Pandemic Triad With the Planetary Uncanny: Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island
Conclusion: Planetary Health Humanities Beyond Anthropocentrism
Acknowledgments
Notes
References
12 Entangled Humanism and Impersonal Circuits of Imperial Power: An Interview With William E. Connolly By Heike Härting and Heather Meek
References
Index