1st Edition
The Routledge Companion to Media and Risk
This collection presents new work in risk media studies from critical humanities perspectives. Defining, historicizing, and consolidating current scholarship, the volume seeks to shape an emerging field, signposting its generative insights while examining its implicit assumptions.
When and under what conditions does risk emerge? How is risk mediated? Who are the targets of risk media? Who manages risk? Who lives with it? Who are most in danger? Such questions—the what, how, who, when, and why of risk media—inform the scope of this volume. With roots in critical media studies and science and technology studies, it hopes to inspire new questions, perspectives, frameworks, and analytical tools not only for risk, media, and communication studies, but also for social and cultural theories.
Editors Bishnupriya Ghosh and Bhaskar Sarkar bring together contributors who elucidate and interrogate risk media’s varied histories and futures. This book is meant for students and scholars of media and communication studies, science and technology studies, and the interdisciplinary humanities, looking either to deepen their engagement with risk media or to broaden their knowledge of this emerging field.
Chapter 1 "Media and Risk: An Introduction"
Bhaskar Sarkar and Bishnupriya Ghosh
- Historical Perspectives
- Expertise
- Times
- Scale
- Virtuality
- Affect
- Legitimacy
- Disciplinary Modulations
Chapter 2 "Has Risk a History?"
Gaspar Mairal
Chapter 3 "Risk: The Origin of the Word in Medieval Commerce and Poetry"
Wolf Kittler
Chapter 4 "Insurance and the Language of Risk in Early Modern Political Thought"
Emily Nacol
Chapter 5 "Hazardous Individualism"
Jason Puskar
Chapter 6 "Risk Media in Medicine: The Rise of the Metaclinical Health App Ecosystem"
Kirsten Ostherr
Chapter 7 "The Algorithm Dispositif: Risk and Automation in the Age of #datapolitik"
Davide Panagia
Chapter 8 "The Perils of Migration: Countervailing Mediations of Risk at the EU's
Maritime Frontier"
Charles Heller and Lorenzo Pezzani
Chapter 9 "Mediating Expertise: Uncertain Risks of Electromagnetic Pollution"
Rahul Mukherjee
Chapter 10 "Preparedness Documents After the Fact"
Lindsay Thomas
Chapter 11 "Is there a Ghost in the Computer? A Spectrology of Uncanny Risks"
Projit Bihari Mukharji
Chapter 12 "New Media At Risk, or When The Future Ain’t What It Used To Be"
Tim Murray
Chapter 13 "Into the Beyond: A Conversation with Michael Madsen"
Michael Madsen, Bishnupriya Ghosh and Bhaskar Sarkar
Chapter 14 "Chernobyl, Risk, and the Inter-Zone of the Anthropocene"
Adrian Iakhiv
Chapter 15 "Risk, Law, and Media: A Case of Climate Change"
Ariel C. Nelson and Janet Walker
Chapter 16 "Media/Meteo¯ra"
Greg Siegel
Chapter 17 "Red Dot Sight"
Colin Milburn and Rita Raley
Chapter 18 "The Safety"
Jordan Crandall
Chapter 19 "Tunnel Risk and the Mediation of Border Security Spectacle"
Juan Llamas Rodriguez
Chapter 20 "Floating Architectures: Fantasises of Safety in Oceanic Riskscapes"
Melody Jue
Chapter 21 "Corrections to the First Draft of History"
Raqs Media Collective
Chapter 22 "Social Media and the Social Question: Speculations on Risk Media Society"
Joshua Neves
Chapter 23 "Your Brain on Screens: Neuronal Risk and Media Addiction"
Tom Lamarrea
Chapter 24 "Risk’s Fraught Mediascape"
Jeff Scheible
Chapter 25 "‘One little seed blowing in the wind’: Risk media in trans-species
biogovernance"
John Shiga
Chapter 26 "Reflections on Risk, Media, and the Reasonable Animated by a Trial by Jury"
Lawrence Cohen
Chapter 27 "Cruising Sex, Surviving Desire"
Daren Fowler
Chapter 28 "Skin Out of the Game: Virtual Gambling in Novel Spaces"
Alex Mirowski and Edward Castronova
Chapter 29 "Risk as Aesthetic Virtue"
Vinzenz Hediger
Chapter 30 "Notes on Dissent and Risk"
Ricardo Dominguez
Chapter 31 "Trigger Warnings and the Disciplining of Cinema and Media Pedagogy"
Lucas Hilderbrand
Chapter 32 "A Path So Twisted" – Staying Off the Straight and Narrow"
Jack Halberstam
Chapter 33 "The Risk of Tolerance: Feminist Killjoys, the Creative Humanities, and the
Belligerent University"
Karen Redrobe
Biography
Bishnupriya Ghosh teaches postcolonial theory and global media studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Much of her scholarly work, including the two books, When Borne Across: Literary Cosmopolitics in the Contemporary Indian Novel (2004) and Global Icons: Apertures to the Popular (2011), investigates contemporary cultures of globalization. She is currently working on two monographs on speculative knowledge: a book on spectral materialism in global cinemas (The Unhomely Sense: Spectral Cinemas of Globalization) and a comparative study of epidemic media in the United States, South Africa, and India (The Virus Touch: Living with Epidemics).
Bhaskar Sarkar, Associate Professor of Film and Media, UC Santa Barbara, is the author of Mourning the Nation: Indian Cinema in the Wake of Partition (2009). He has published a wide range of articles in edited collections like World Cinemas, Transnational Perspectives (2008), International Communication (2012), and Figurations in Indian Film (2013), as well as in journals such as Rethinking History, positions: asia-critique, Cultural Dynamics, and Transnational Cinemas. He is also co-editor of Documentary Testimonies: Global Archives of Suffering (2009), Asian Video Cultures: In the Penumbra of the Global (2017), and two journal special issues, "The Subaltern and the Popular," Journal of Postcolonial Studies (2005) and "Indian Documentary Studies," BioScope (2012). He is currently working on two monographs: Cosmoplastics: Bollywood’s Global Gesture, and Pirate Humanities.
