Microbial Resolution: Visualization and Security in the War against Emerging Microbes

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Gloria Chan-Sook Kim

Microbial Resolution

Visualization and Security in the War against Emerging Microbes

Gloria Chan-Sook Kim

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English

University of Minnesota Press
25 September 2024

Media studies; Epidemiology & medical statistics; History of medicine; Medical microbiology & virology

Series: Proximities

An interdisciplinary study charting the war against microbial futures leads to a new theory of contemporary vision and visuality

In 1989, a group of U.S. government scientists met to discuss some surprising findings: new diseases were appearing around the world, and viruses that they thought long vanquished were resurfacing. Their appearance heralded a future perpetually threatened by unforeseeable biological risks, sparking a new concept of disease: the ""emerging microbe."" With the Cold War nearing its end, American scientists and security experts turned to confront this new ""enemy,"" redirecting national security against its risky horizons. In order to be fought, emerging microbes first needed to be made perceptible; but how could something immaterial, unknowable, and ever mutating be coaxed into visibility, knowability, and operability?

Microbial Resolution charts the U.S.-led war on the emerging microbe to show how their uncertain futures were transformed into objects of global science and security. Moving beyond familiar accounts that link scientific knowledge production to optical practices of visualizing the invisible, Gloria Chan-Sook Kim develops a theory of ""microbial resolution"" to analyze the complex problematic that arises when dealing with these entities: what can be seen when there is nothing to see? Through a syncretic analysis of data mining, animal-tracking technologies, media networks, computer-modeled futures, and global ecologies and infrastructures, she shows how a visual impasse-the impossibility of seeing microbial futures-forms the basis for new modes of perceiving, knowing, and governing in the present.

Timely and thought provoking, Microbial Resolution opens up the rich paradoxes, irreconcilabilities, and failures inherent in this project and demonstrates how these tensions profoundly animate twenty-first-century epistemologies, aesthetics, affects, and ecologies.

By: Gloria Chan-Sook Kim
Imprint: University of Minnesota Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 216mm, Width: 140mm, Spine: 18mm
Weight: 425g
ISBN: 9781517911690
ISBN 10: 1517911699
Series: Proximities
Pages: 256
Publication Date: 25 September 2024
Audience: Professional and scholarly , Undergraduate
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Contents Preface Introduction: Microbial Resolution Part I. Aesthetics of Uncertainty 1. Pathogenic Nation Making 2. Materializing Emerging Microbes Part II. The Calculative Imaginary 3. Flightlines and Sightlines 4. Fluid Economies of Biosecurity 5. Managing the Microbial Frontier Acknowledgments Notes Index

Gloria Chan-Sook Kim is assistant professor of media and culture at the University of California, Riverside. Her work has been published in journals such as Configurations: A Journal of Literature, Science, and Technology and the Journal for Consumption, Markets, and Culture.

Reviews for Microbial Resolution: Visualization and Security in the War against Emerging Microbes

"""How can we secure ourselves against a life-form that is invisible yet omnipresent? Untouchable yet capable of remaking the planet? Gloria Chan-Sook Kim’s visual methodology proposes a clear optic for understanding how global health responses to microbial threats will fail unless we wrestle with the systems that perpetuate the conditions for the next mutant microbe on the horizon.""—Stefanie R. Fishel, author of The Microbial State: Global Thriving and the Body Politic ""Now that we all care about microbial emergence, here is a fabulous book—researched just prior to the Covid-19 pandemic—that gives us the epistemological tools to understand it. Gloria Chan-Sook Kim’s timely study examines the scientific practices, media, and discourses that anticipate microbial populations to come, ever attentive to the visual politics of resolution.""—Melody Jue, author of Wild Blue Media: Thinking through Seawater "