By Lauren Barnhart
UC Santa Barbara English and Global Studies professor Bishnupriya Ghosh has just published her third book, The Virus Touch: Theorizing Epidemic Media. Writing in the shadow of the HIV/AIDS epidemics, Ghosh has introduced the term “epidemic media” to describe how scientists communicate their findings with one another by photos, data graphs, artwork, and animations, in order to track viruses and manage mass viral outbreaks.
UCSB English and Global Studies professor Bishnupriya Ghosh said that understanding the ways health experts portray epidemics through photos, data graphs, artwork, and animations is critical to combatting future diseases.
Ghosh says the way experts portray epidemics through artistic and graphic media communications has “everything to do with future epidemics and pandemics,” as these media forms prioritize targets for medical intervention and allow scientists to come up with solutions such as vaccines, other pharmaceuticals, and medical therapies. By examining past epidemic experiences, Ghosh hopes to help prevent widespread disease by pinning down the sources of infection — with effective media expressions of epidemics at the “heart” of communication efforts.
Ghosh began her research in 2009 intending to write a few short essays. But the research she collected prompted her to turn it into a book-length publication. After more than a decade of investigation, Ghosh has now published her findings for other humanities scholars to learn from her experiences. She sat down for an interview recently.
Q: What inspired you to research media forms for communicating epidemics?
A: As a member of the generation that lived through the HIV/AIDS epidemic and as someone who lived between the US and India, I was very aware of the vastly different versions of health care distribution during this period. While I saw many of my friends succumb to the disease before the release of antiretrovirals in the US, the situation in India was even more dire. The antiretrovirals were not available and proper healthcare wasn’t accessible. This discrepancy sparked my interest in the global distribution of risk.
We have these epidemiological models that tell us that there is infection around but there are also media forms. They are so functional that we don’t tend to think of them as media, but they really do give you a sense of your relationship to the virus. As I investigated these forms, I soon began to realize that there are stakes to how we make media. Media prepares targets for intervention and has everything to do with how we create solutions.
Q: Did any of your scientific research findings surprise you?
A: A lot of it surprised me. But one moment occurred in the Scripps molecular graphic lab in San Diego.
The Scripps molecular lab has been making 3D, editable images of the HIV-1 macromolecule for several years, sourcing input data from molecular biologists, biochemists, and structural biologists. Through these models they say that they can materialize mathematical and scientific calculations into an image. As new data emerges and recalculations occur, new images are created, allowing Scripps’ scientists to “see” the changes in the virus as an image. Seeing these changes has allowed the lab to hypothesize structural details where there is insufficient or missing data and speculate what they need to do more research on.
Professor Ghosh recently published her third book, The Virus Touch: Theorizing Epidemic Media, which contains more than a decade of research about how scientists use art and graphic media to communicate information about endemics and pandemics.
I was talking to the scientists about their work and came to realize that many of them are artists. They make viral images with colors as a natural differentiator, distinguishing between boundaries and giving you a finer sense of the virus, but they don’t think about it in terms of aesthetics. From here, I found the artists who work with these scientists to create scientific graphics of viruses.
I was very surprised that science was always cultural and in fact very embedded in aesthetic work, what we call “artwork.” That part of it made the search for epidemic media very much my business as global studies and media scholar.
Q: What was the best parts of the writing process?
A: Getting to learn more about small health care providers who complete epidemic work for vulnerable communities. There are nonprofit outfits all over South Asia and South Africa who have been implementing antiretroviral therapies, but they do it on a shoestring budget and deal with the communities that they serve in extremely creative ways. I was quite impressed with their service, and I wanted to put their work into circulation. The extent and robustness of these small-scale outfits all over the world that have worked on epidemics was one of the most heartening things and best inspirations for the book.
Q: What would you like students interested in humanities and global studies to take away from your book?
A: In global studies, I would really like for students to think about how we do multi-scale analysis. Something we always look at in global studies is the financial backing of this analysis, which in this case is the big tech. All of that is there, the state-of-the-art PCR machines, huge HIV/AID networks trials, other biomedical infrastructures, and they are fantastic. But what I would like people to look at is how that global story is folded into much smaller histories. These smaller stories embedded in epidemics contribute to its understanding and they must be considered for prevention of future outbreaks.
Lauren Barnhart is a third-year student at UC Santa Barbara, majoring in Political Science. She wrote this article for her Writing Program course Digital Journalism.