Here’s a working thesis on the present global moment: 1. For many people around the world, life has always been precarious. But for a certain class — the global middle class (and up) — the world had felt more or less secure and comfortable, as long as one knew how to navigate it: play by […]
Posts Tagged ‘COVID-19’
The feeling of the world
Posted in Cultural politics, tagged affective politics, Anthropocene, conspiracy culture, COVID-19, global cultural studies, global middle class, illiberalism on January 18, 2022 | Leave a Comment »
Dreamlife of the Anthropocene
Posted in Spirit matter, tagged brain, COVID-19, dream research, dreaming, dreamlife, emotional practices, mind, pandemic, psychology on November 8, 2021 | 2 Comments »
The work of environmental/climate humanists is premised on the assumption that the way we make sense of the world matters. This means that the dreams we have — Covid pandemic dreams, climate change dreams — also matter. The best artists, in turn, help shape our collective dreaming. The environmental arts and humanities aim to help […]
“Trust your (foamy) immune system”
Posted in Anthropocene, Eco-theory, tagged actor-network theory, anti-vaccination movement, co-immunism, co-immunology, COVID-19, Foams, immunity, immunological theory, networks, Peter Sloterdijk, public health, Spheres on August 2, 2021 | 7 Comments »
“Trust your immune system.” One often hears this slogan, or some version of it, from people who are against vaccination. But what does it mean, or what should it mean for an intensely social species like ours, living in a microbiologically fluid and creative environment like Earth’s biosphere? We can only trust something if we […]
Post-pandemic, what will have changed?
Posted in Manifestos & auguries, Media ecology, Politics, tagged ClimateJustice, COVID-19, ecojustice, environmentalism, futurism, globalism, green cities, green politics, international green movement, localism, media ecology, optimism, pandemic, post-pandemic, predictions on May 13, 2021 | 2 Comments »
When we look back at this time a few decades hence, what changes will we take the pandemic of 2020-21 to have ushered in? How will it have transformed work, recreation, travel and transportation, food, politics, and everything else? The following are some initial thoughts toward a hopeful eco-justice based perspective on how the world […]
The [Real]: on Rothko, music, & the Global Trends 2040 report
Posted in Anthropocene, Manifestos & auguries, Music & soundscape, tagged ambient music, Brian Eno, climate crisis, COVID-19, Global Trends 2040, hyper-events, hyperobjects, industrial ambient, Mark Rothko, Morton Feldman, National Intelligence Council, pandemic, Peter Gabriel, The Real, William Basinski on April 15, 2021 | Leave a Comment »
Fans of Mark Rothko’s color field paintings frequently comment on the spaciousness, immersiveness, and liminality of those works: the way you can stand in front of them and feel as if you are being bathed in some transcendent force that is irreducible to anything else. Great art is (supposed to be) like that: it simply […]
Letter to a vaccine skeptic
Posted in Cultural politics, Science & society, tagged Anomalies, anti-vaccination movement, anti-vaxx, climate crisis, conspiracies, conspiracy culture, conspiracy theories, conspiratistics, conspiratology, COVID-19, emergency brake, Letters to..., pandemic politics, pandemic response, vaccine science on April 12, 2021 | 1 Comment »
The following distills the essence of my responses to questions from a vaccine (and Covid) skeptical friend. I share it in case it’s useful for others (and because it updates a few things I’ve written before on the topic). I’m not an epidemiologist and the comments on the science of the pandemic are those of […]
Hydroxychloroquine, and other things (an STS perspective)
Posted in Science & society, tagged COVID-19, Hydroxychloroquine, medicine, Norman Doidge, pandemic politics, public communication of science, replication crisis, science and technology studies, science controversies, STS on August 20, 2020 | 4 Comments »
The Covid-19 pandemic has offered all kinds of interesting case studies for those who study controversies in science, technology, and medicine. Hydroxychloroquine is one of them. It’s a bit unusual in that it highlights how the left-liberal mediasphere has sometimes followed similar trajectories as more commonly found on the (Trumpist) political right. But it’s interesting […]
Covid-19 conspiracies and the media: or, Toward an epidemiology of media trust
Posted in Media ecology, Science & society, tagged Anomalies, Bruno Latour, conspiracies, conspiracy culture, conspiracy theories, Coronavirus, COVID-19, disinformation, epidemiology of media trust, epistemology, fake news, information regimes, infovirology, media, media ecology, media politics, media theory, media trust, mediasphere, post-truth, Q, QAnon, Steve Fuller on May 17, 2020 | 4 Comments »
The global pandemic of Covid-19 has been accompanied by a proliferation of competing narratives of what the crisis is and means, and how it should be addressed. The UN and the World Health Organization have called this an “infodemic,” that is, an epidemic (or pandemic) of information that, in its confusing diversity, has made it […]
Pandemic epistemology 2
Posted in Science & society, tagged Coronavirus, COVID-19, Ed Yong, epistemology, frontier science, interdisciplinarity, pandemic politics, pandemic response, sociology of science, Thomas Kuhn, transdisciplinarity on May 4, 2020 | Leave a Comment »
I’ve been haunted by Ed Yong’s description of science from the Atlantic article “Why Coronavirus is So Confusing,” which I shared a few days ago: “This is how science actually works. It’s less the parade of decisive blockbuster discoveries that the press often portrays, and more a slow, erratic stumble toward ever less uncertainty. “Our […]
Pandemic epistemology
Posted in Science & society, tagged Anomalies, anomalistics, Atlantic Monthly, conspiracies, Coronavirus, COVID-19, Ed Yong, epistemology, media, mediasphere, pandemic politics, pandemics, public communication of science, public trust, science communication on April 30, 2020 | Leave a Comment »
One of the silver linings about the coronavirus pandemic is that it has made some people, and even institutions, more generous (at least temporarily). Among them are popular and academic journals that have removed their paywalls and offered their publications for free. (I shared one of my own articles in that category yesterday. The irony, […]