The Pandemic Dashboard

Examining mainstream media on COVID-19 across China, Italy, the United Kingdom, and the United States, and by drawing from various critical theoretical traditions, this book seeks answers to key questions about the experience of living and dying under COVID-19.

The COVID-19 pandemic has been conceived, narrated, and visualized as a numerical crisis and a statistical exception – from the proliferation of dashboards to the numbers of infections cited in news cycles, and the data literacy required to navigate the viral spread. How did these dashboards, along with other numerical images and narratives, condition the lived experience during COVID-19? Is that experience still shaping how we perceive and communicate about the world today? In this book, the authors explore pandemic power – a form of power that declares the beginning and end of the pandemic as a statistically calculable exception, and that works in tandem with a Dashboard worldview. It also argues that pandemic power has normalized a geospatial and biostatistical gaze, the military and political legacies of which constructed the pandemic as we have come to know it, and continued to invigorate its persisting afterlives.

This book will benefit students, teachers, and scholars interested in media and critical studies of COVID-19, as well as anyone interested in the political theorization of the changing forms of power during and after the pandemic.