A virus as an icon: the 2020 pandemic in images

What can art history offer medical humanities?

This article charts the emergence of visual medical humanities as a space of academic research, creative practice and lively critical debate, with a focus on how art historical scholarship has influenced the field's formation. Concentrating on developments over the past decade, it offers an overview of current scholarship while highlighting opportunities and challenges for the future. We begin with a survey of medical and health humanities handbooks and readers, noting that their engagement with art and visual culture is predominately limited to the contexts of therapy, clinical pedagogy and medical history. The main part of the article explores art historical scholarship in relation to three areas of significance for the medical humanities. First, we address art historical research that engages with medical history, identifying major topoi including the anatomical body, the doctor-patient encounter and the close relationship between clinical and artistic vision; we argue that this work has tended to presume, rather than explicitly articulate, its relationship to medical humanities and recommend that art historians wishing to engage more deeply with the medical humanities need to clearly communicate what their work brings to wider debates in the field. Second, we explore contemporary arts practices that mobilise health-related experiences, forms of care and practical activism: medical humanities, we argue, has much to gain from a critical engagement with contemporary (as well as historical) art. Third, we review three art history-led projects that are redefining the field and promoting new models for collaborative 'entanglement' across disciplines: Art HX: Visual and Medical Legacies of British Colonialism; Visualizing the Virus; and Confabulations: Art Practice, Art History, Critical Medical Humanities By arguing for the vital importance of attending to the critical complexities of art and visual culture, this article aims to enrich existing debates and provoke a new wave of visually engaged medical humanities scholarship.

Forensic rhetoric: COVID-19, the forum and the boundaries of healthcare evidence

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought into sharp focus the shifting role of healthcare evidence in public health presentations. This article investigates the rhetoric of those presentations as a phenomenon indicating both the commitment to evidence-based public health messaging and its political loading in three interlinked case studies: computer-generated imagery ; 'podium' presentation and the NSO Fleming leak of COVID-19 contact tracing data. The pandemic has seen healthcare evidence attain ever-greater visibility in public forums, and those forums have themselves undergone rapid transformation. 'Podium' presentations such as press conferences have featured colourful imagery, and the manifold visualisations of SARS-CoV-2 which have accompanied television broadcasts and web pages display an insistent internal rhetoric. I analyse both forms of rhetoric for what they say about the 'forensic' moment created by COVID-19, and evaluate each in relation to Weizman's conception of the forum, which enables both 'frontstage' corporate and governmental image-building and public scrutiny. This paper evaluates the politics of the presentational strategies which have arisen around COVID-19 and the ethical potential of the forum.

Circulation of Coronavirus Images: Helping Social Distancing?

As soon as the SARS-Cov2 disease was recognized by experts to potentially cause a serious pandemic, a three dimensional diagrammatic image of the virus, colored in strong red, conquered public media globally. This study confronts this iconic virus image with a historic image analysis of 33,000 biomedical articles on coronaviruses published between 1968-2020 and interviews with some of their authors. Only a small fraction of scientific virus publications entail images of the complete virus. Red as an alarm color is not used at all by scientists who don't aim for a non-scientific public. Circulation in this case concerns the movement of iconic images from a scientific context into a general public. On the basis of hps-studies on scientific diagrams and especially on color use in scientific diagrams to convey specific messages in public, the paper discusses the role of the claim of public corona-virus diagram as "scientific." It points at relevant differences between most frequent scientific corona-virus images and the diagrammatic image used in public. Both author- and readerships (in science and public) follow contrasting aims and values. Thus, the images meet non-expert readers for whom the images entail very different - and potentially unintended - meanings then to virus experts.

'There is nothing less spectacular than a pestilence': Picturing the pandemic in Mass Observation's COVID-19 collections

What is to be gained by studying visual observation in Mass Observation's COVID-19 collections? What can we see of the pandemic through diarists' images and words? Visual methods were part of the plural research strategies of social research organisation Mass Observation (MO) in its first phase, when it was established in 1937, but remained marginal in relation to textual research methods. This continues with the post-1981 revival of the Mass Observation Project (MOP), with its emphasis on life writing. With wider shifts in technology and accessibility, however, even when they are not solicited, photographs now accompany MOP correspondents' submissions. In MO's substantial COVID-19 collections, images appear in or as diary entries across a range of forms, including hand-drawn illustrations, correspondent-generated photographs, creative photomontages, and screengrabs of memes. In addition, diarists offer textual reflections on COVID-19's image cultures, such as the role of photographs in pandemic news media, as well as considering how the pandemic is intersecting with the visual in more abstract ways, from themes of surveillance and 'Staying Alert' in public health messaging to internal pictorial imaginaries produced as a result of isolation and contemplation. Positioning these materials in relation to wider patterns in pandemic visual culture, including public photographic collecting projects that make explicit reference to MO as their inspiration, this article considers the contribution of the visual submissions and image-rich writing in MO's COVID-19 collections to the depiction of a virus commonly characterised as invisible.

COVID-19 in Mass Media: Manufacturing Mass Perceptions of the Virus among Older Adults

According to the latest The Global Risks Report (2022) of World Economic Forum, the large-scale coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) threat creates various tensions that might lead to unexpected cascading impacts in various domains. Nevertheless, the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) virus, about 120 nm in diameter, remains invisible to people whose cognition, emotions, and health-related behaviors are driven primarily by the subjective perception of the virus. Mass media communicating information, symbols, beliefs, and codes of conduct to the population contribute widely to the socially constructed representations of the new SARS-CoV-2 virus. Thus, the aim of the current research is to investigate the impacts of the common COVID-19 mass media image of the “ball with spikes” representing the SARS-CoV-2 virus on older adults particularly vulnerable to the COVID-19 coronavirus disease and fake news dissemination. This research is based on an innovative mixed-methods research design that combines questionnaires (N = 144), semi-structured research interviews, and pictographic measures (N = 26). The primary results demonstrate that individuals’ perceptions of and emotional reactions to the invisible SARS-CoV-2 virus are shaped by mass media exposure, as the “ball with spikes” became a familiar symbol of the COVID-19 virus, marked by the symbolism of dangerousness and mystery with a divisive aesthetic. The current research that aims to highlight the role of mass media as the vector of an icon image of the new SARS-CoV-2 virus provides additional elements that may contribute to improved crisis management effectiveness of future pandemic outbreaks.

'Generic visuals' of Covid-19 in the news: Invoking banal belonging through symbolic reiteration

In the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, images of the virus molecule and 'flatten-the-curve' line charts were inescapable. There is now a vast visual repertoire of vaccines, people wearing face masks in everyday settings, choropleth maps and both bar and line charts. These 'generic visuals' circulate widely in the news media and, however unremarkable, play an important role in representing the crisis in particular ways. We argue that these generic visuals promote banal nationalism, localism and cosmopolitanism in the face of the crisis, and that they do so through the symbolic reiteration of a range of visual resources across news stories. Through an analysis of three major news outlets in the UK, we examine how generic visuals of Covid-19 contribute to these banal visions and versions of belonging and, in doing so, also to foregrounding the role of the state in responding to the crisis.

Covid-19: The cultural constructions of a global crisis

This is the Introduction to the special issue on Covid-19 and the cultural constructions of a global crisis. Contextualizing understandings of the pandemic in relation to the concepts of 'event' and 'crisis', especially to the idea that modernity is itself a condition of perpetual crisis, it proposes that the pandemic is a crisis-event that catalyses new possibilities for making visible endemic inequalities and injustices across highly variable cultural and social domains, from the personal to the global. Always open to containment and appropriation, this crisis of visibility and invisibility is discussed as it pertains to the body, to space and social proximity, and to media and mediation. The individual contributions to the special issue are introduced in relation to these topics.