Avian Flu and Embodied Global Imagery: A Study of Pandemic Geopolitics in the Media

A discourse analysis of Ebola in South African newspapers (2014–2015)

“…Key to the threat to humanity discourse is the stock image of spread that is characteristic of pandemic risk. Pandemics imply ‘movement, directionality and contagious spread’; boundaries become porous, leading to zones cordoned off for containment (Aaltola, 2012, p. 668). This discourse was also found in Vellek’s (2016) content analysis of newspaper reports of Ebola as a global threat, one made possible by easier travel options in the modern world.…”

“…In the discourse of hope (Washer, 2004), the risk of infection remains relegated to ‘primitive’ peoples, making this the West’s way of talking so that it does not consider itself to be at risk as long as its borders are not transgressed. As conceptualised by Aaltola (2012), Western lay people usually watch a scenario unfolding elsewhere and judge performers on a foreign disease stage. This reinforces the ‘us’ and ‘other’ distinction.…”

Playing at apocalypse: Reading Plague Inc. in pandemic culture

“…The entangled elements of these storylines are clearly evident in the tensions between Plague Inc .’s construction of the global as the pertinent scale of pandemic threat, and the ways in which its idea of the global relies upon a preexisting order of nations. Aaltola (2012b) notes ‘national imagined communities have been the primary embedding in rendering diseases meaningful’. In this way, distinctions between nations appear to be flattened by a universal notion of disease vulnerability, and yet, familiar notions of ‘civilized’ and ‘primordial’ that have long undergirded the outbreak narrative creep back into Plague Inc .’s geography of disease at multiple turns.…”

“…By referencing HIV/AIDS, polio, the 1918 Flu, and so on, Plague Inc . ‘alarms by benchmarking the current threat through popularized memories of past disease encounters’ (Aaltola, 2012b). Importantly, it locates the player’s disease in the space–time of ongoing threat characteristic of the experience of pandemic culture outside of the game.…”

Geopolítica de la pandemia del Covid-19

“…Consultada una de las base de datos más importantes, la Web of Science, apenas cuatro trabajos aluden a esta relación (geopolitics y pandemics). Uno de ellos es sobre la promoción de políticas públicas de salud (Labonte, 2011), otro sobre la experiencia histórica de los judíos italianos, marcada entre otras cosas por una epidemia en los años 1980 (Nissan, 2011), uno más sobre el impacto de la epidemia de VIH en la antigua Unión Soviética (Ambrosio, 2006), y sólo uno de una experiencia algo equiparable a la actual, la gripe aviar (Aaltola, 2012), aunque con mucho menos impacto.…”