Planetary Health Humanities and Pandemics [Paperback]

This volume explores the variable meanings and discourses of historical and contemporary pandemics to rethink theories and practices of planetary health.?

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 eighteenth-century woman authors readings of plague, intersecting narratives of nineteenth-century lactation and vaccination, and the forgotten biopolitics of NASAs 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. 

Heike H?rting is Associate Professor of English in the Department of Literatures and Languages of the World at Universit? de Montr?al, Canada.

Heather Meek is Associló'