Chapter Pre-release from Body, Capital, and Screens

Kirsten Ostherr, PhD, MPH is the Gladys Louise Fox Professor of English at Rice University in Houston, Texas. In her chapter ‘Zika Virus, Global Health Communication, and Dataveillance’ from the forthcoming AUP book Body, Capital, and Screens: Visual Media and the Healthy Self in the 20th Century, edited by Christian Bonah and Anja Laukötter, Ostherr analyses the approaches to health promotion and health communication of the post-war era, while also highlighting the transition from international to global health frameworks for imagining the processes of disease interventions.

Abstract

Through analysis of media produced by the World Health Organization (WHO) in response to the Zika virus outbreak of 2016, this chapter demonstrates how distributed digital communication networks such as social media platforms have created significant challenges for the WHO’s top-down model of information management. Unlike disease outbreaks of the past, Zika virus media circulated through mobile, social digital networks shaped by invisible algorithms and filter bubbles that helped generate counter narratives opposing the communications of official health organizations. This chapter examines Zika virus media through the analytical frames of datafication, dataveillance, and data-making to explain how diverse sources of information and social contexts of interpretation pose new challenges for global health communications.

Download

You can download Kirsten Ostherr's chapter here.

Publication due June 2020

Body, Capital, and Screens will be published in Hardback and in Open Access on 2nd June 2020. You can view and download the table of contents here.