1st Edition

Planetary Health Humanities and Pandemics

Edited By Heike Härting, Heather Meek Copyright 2024
304 Pages 16 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

304 Pages 16 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

304 Pages 16 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

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,... Read more

List of Figures

 

List of Contributors

 

Foreword, Dipesh Chakrabarty

 

Acknowledgments

 

Introduction, 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

Biography

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.