1st Edition

The Pandemic Dashboard Theorizing Big Data in the Media

By Giovanna Borradori, Ruoyu Li Copyright 2026
294 Pages 19 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

294 Pages 19 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

Examining mainstream media on COVID-19 across China, Italy, the United Kingdom, and the United States, and by drawing from various critical theoretical traditions, this book seeks answers to key questions about the experience of living and dying under COVID-19. The COVID-19 pandemic has been conceived, narrated, and visualized as a numerical crisis and a statistical exception – from the... Read more

Introduction. Chapter 1. The Visual Culture of the Pandemic. Chapter 2. A Media Phenomenology of the Pandemic. Chapter 3. A Numerical Ontology of the Pandemic. Chapter 4. The Apparatus of Global Numeration. Chapter 5. Genealogies and Practices of Pandemic Power. Chapter 6. The Pandemic Condition. Conclusion: Numbers and Ashes.

Biography

Giovanna Borradori is a Professor of Philosophy and Media Studies at Vassar College, USA. Her scholarship has investigated the relationship between aesthetics and politics, with particular attention to the visual cultures of neoliberalism, terrorism and collective memory, the philosophy of photography, the phenomenology of new media, and the colonial and postcolonial imagination. Her Philosophy in the Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida (2003) was the first philosophical examination of the events of September 11, 2001, and the geopolitical transformation that followed. Translated into 22 languages, this book generated the historical rapprochement between Critical Theory and deconstruction.

Ruoyu Li is an Assistant Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies at Colgate University, USA. She was a Henry A. Kissinger Predoctoral Fellow at the Jackson School of Global Affairs at Yale University (2024–2025). Her research focuses on US nuclear testing in the Pacific Ocean, captured at the intersection of Critical International Relations, Pacific Studies, and Science and Technology Studies. Her articles have appeared in Security Studies and International Politics.