Offering a comprehensive analysis of mediated representations of global pandemics, this book engages with the construction, management, and classification of difference in the global context of a pandemic, to address what it means ¿ culturally, politically, and economically ¿ to live in an infected, diseased body. Marina Levina argues that mediated representations are essential in translating and making sense of difference as a category of subjectivity and as a mode of organizing and distributing change. Using textual analysis of media texts on pandemics and disease, she illustrates how they represent a larger mediascape that drafts stories of global instabilities and global health. Levina explains how the stories we tell about disease matter; that the media is instrumental in constructing and disseminating these stories; and that mediated narratives of pandemics are rooted in global flows of policies, commerce, and populations. Pandemics are, by definition, global crises.

Marina Levina (PhD, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) is Assistant Professor of Communication at the University of Memphis. She is co-editor of Monster Culture in the 21st Century: A Reader (2013) and Post-Global Network and Everyday Life (2012).

Contents: Keeping the Blood Flowing: Disease, Community, and Public Imaginaries ¿ HIV/AIDS and Mediated Narratives of Morality and Citizenship ¿Vampires and HIV/AIDS in the Popular Imagination ¿ Globalization, Pandemics, and the Problem of Security ¿ Zombie Pandemic and Governance of Life Itself ¿ Pandemics and Digital Media Technologies.