Planetary Health Humanities and Pandemics

1. Auflage 2024
ISBN: 978-1-032-43163-5
Verlag: Routledge

Buch, Englisch, 304 Seiten, Format (B × H): 157 mm x 235 mm, Gewicht: 596 g

Reihe: Routledge Studies in Health Humanities

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.

Zielgruppe

Postgraduate

Autoren/Hrsg.

Härting, Heike

Meek, Heather

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Sprachwissenschaft Sprachwissenschaften

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Contents

List of Figures

List of Contributors

Foreword, Dipesh Chakrabarty

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Intersecting Narratives of Planetary Thought and Pandemics, Heike Härting and Heather Meek

Section A: Pandemic Anxieties and Historical Genealogies of Planetary Health

1 “So Spreading and Penetrating a Disease”: Margaret Cavendish’s Imaginative Landscapes of Plague

Heather Meek

2 Lactination: Planetary Bodies and Their Fluid Encounters in the Early Vaccination Narrative

Anna E. MacDonald

3 Mobilizing Health between the Global and the Planetary: Apollo 11, Airstream, and NASA’s Planetary Quarantine Program Richard A. McKay

Section B: Reading Planetary Health Narratives: Epistemology, Theory, and Practice

4 Decolonial Epi-pathographies of Planetary Health: Tragedy, Policy, Art

Heike Härting

5 Little COVID-19, All Grown Up in the Planetary: Reconsidering Health Humanities Instrumentalism in the COVID-19 Pandemic

Shane Neilson

6 Tiger Symmetries: Pandemic as Gift

Larissa Lai

7 Historicizing Planetary Health Policy: Health Work and Wages across Global and Planetary Health

Ramah McKay

Section C: Pandemic Ontologies, Body Politics, and a Planetary Health Commons

8 Contagious Bodies: A Pandemic of Racism Yasmin Jiwani

9 #Zoombies: Cybernetic Trance in Pandemic Times Samuele Collu

10 Planetary Health (In)humanities: Disordering the Colony Collapse

Olivia Banner and Kathryn Whitlock

11 Narrating the Uncanny Triad: Imagining Microbe, Animal, and Human Entanglements within the Planetary Health Humanities Leonie Bossert and Davina Höll

12 Entangled Humanism and Impersonal Circuits of Imperial Power: An Interview with William Connolly

Heike Härting and Heather Meek

Index

Über Autor(innen)

Heike Härting is Associate Professor of English in the Department of Literatures and Languages of the World at Université de Montréal, Canada.

Heather Meek is Associate Professor of English in the Department of Literatures and Languages of the World at Université de Montréal, Canada.