The Virus Touch

In The Virus Touch Bishnupriya Ghosh argues that media are central to understanding emergent relations between viruses, humans, and nonhuman life. Writing in the shadow of the HIV/AIDS and COVID-19 global pandemics, Ghosh theorizes “epidemic media” to show how epidemics are mediated in images, numbers, and movements through the processes of reading test results and tracking infection and mortality rates. Scientific, artistic, and activist epidemic media that make multispecies relations sensible and manageable eschew anthropocentric survival strategies and instead recast global public health crises as biological, social, and ecological catastrophes, pushing us toward a multispecies politics of health. Ghosh trains her analytic gaze on these mediations as expressed in the collection and analysis of blood samples as a form of viral media; the geospatialization of data that track viral hosts like wild primates; and the use of multisensory images to trace fluctuations in viral mutations. Studying how epidemic media inscribe, store, and transmit multispecies relations attunes us to the anthropogenic drivers of pathogenicity like deforestation or illegal wildlife trading and the vulnerabilities accruing from diseases that arise from socioeconomic inequities and biopolitical neglect.

Join science expert Dr Ben Martynoga and illustrator extraordinaire Moose Allain on a fascinating, sometimes funny, and occasionally scary journey through the world of viruses.Explore the science behind viruses and the COVID-19 pandemic in a fascinating story of hijacked human cells and our own internal emergency services.Along the way, you'll learn what viruses are, how they work, and how we can overcome - or at least learn to live alongside - those that do us harm.

Why are we stuck inside? It's so Boring!? Or is it?

What is the coronavirus, and why is everyone talking about it? Engagingly illustrated by Axel Scheffler, this approachable and timely book helps answer these questions and many more, providing children aged 5-10 and their parents with clear and accessible explanations about the coronavirus and its effects - both from a health perspective and the impact it has on a family’s day-to-day life. With input from expert consultant Professor Graham Medley of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, as well as advice from teachers and child psychologists, this is a practical and informative resource to help explain the changes we are currently all experiencing. The book is free to read and download, but Nosy Crow would like to encourage readers, should they feel in a position to, to make a donation to: https://www.nhscharitiestogether.co.uk/

More and more adults participate as employees in games at work and in public and voluntary organizations. Power at play covers the intricate linkages between pedagogy, play and power. It shows how power today suspends itself through play and analyzes organized play as a symptom of more radical changes of the exercise of power in work and society.

Every aspect of the pandemic was said to be ‘total,’ absolute, and undiscriminating. Its very name implied as much. The virus was everywhere, and a threat to us all. In Philosophy, Biopolitics, and the Virus: The Elision of an Alternative, Michael Lewis identifies three moments within the pandemic that were conceived in such a monolithic way: (1) ‘The Science,’ which had to be unanimous if it was to assume a sovereign role, and to have us ‘follow’ it; (2) ‘non-pharmaceutical interventions,’ which were regarded as the only possible response, without which death and disease would ‘run riot’; and (3) the one sole remedy that could bring about the promised end of the restrictions, to the exclusion of every other conception of medicine, treatment, and care. In each case of seeming universality, dissent immediately identifies you as a friend of the virus. And yet if all of these cases have been revealing their counterproductivity ever since, what are we to make of the elision of alternatives? Is it part of a more general tendency to thrust the questioning of hegemonic notions to the margins of respectable discourse, inhabited solely by the mad, bad, and dangerous to know?

The central message of this book is that the well-being of body, mind, spirit, and planet requires that we nurture our connections. From our skin to the cosmic, to sights and sounds to the Transcendent, this book takes us by the hand to marvel at how life itself is a constellation of interrelationships of touch. We cannot not touch and be touched. Humans live in a biosphere of touch, the touch thriving and bustling within our bodies, the touch of our relationships with family and friends, the touch between neighbors, the touch with Mother Nature, and the touch with the Transcendent. Selfishness, and self-centeredness are the powers withering us and the planet. In our confrontation with our anxiety at death, guilt, and meaningless, we sever the very interrelations that nourish and enrich life. It is imperative, as perhaps never before, that we restore our touch with our deepest selves, others, Mother Nature, and the Transcendent.

This book may be used as a companion piece for Women Empowerment in a pandemic situation. It presents a comprehensive overview of the challenges and opportunities that women face in their quest for justice on gender equality and women's empowerment. It contextualizes them in the current situation where countries and communities are seeking to address the heightened challenges presented by the COVID-19 crisis and recover from its devastating effects.