Planetary Health Humanities and Pandemics

This volume explores the variable meanings and discourses of historical and contemporary pandemics to rethink theories and practices of planetary health. Rather than conflating the planetary with anthropogenic climate change, planetary geo-engineering, or the 'global, ' the volume elaborates a version of planetary health humanities that invites decolonial, creative, and pluridisciplinary modes of thinking and sees 'health' as a complex non-anthropocentric process that moves within the multiple scales of the planetary. The volume offers new historical trajectories as it considers an 18th-century woman author's readings of plague, intersecting narratives of 19th-century lactation and vaccination, and the forgotten biopolitics of NASA's Planetary Quarantine Program. It offers accounts of decolonial and oracular planetary health, insists that the role of literature in the health humanities is not merely instrumental, explores viral and planetary co-inhabitations, and scrutinizes inequities faced by global health workers. The volume also includes discussions of cybernetic addiction and the complex entanglements of humans, microbes, and bees. Its concluding interview addresses the concrete impact of current planetary transformations on individual and collective health. Bringing together multiple disciplines, the volume will be of interest to students and scholars in health humanities, literary studies, postcolonial studies, medical history, and narrative medicine.

Author: Heike H?ting, Heather Meek

Publisher: Routledge

Publication Date: Mar 29, 2024

Number of Pages: NA pages

Language: English

Binding: Hardcover

ISBN-10: 1032431636

ISBN-13: 9781032431635