Welcome to this special summer episode of Translating COVID 19.
I am maternally allow me research fellow at the Queens College University of Oxford.
Today, I am thrilled to introduce a wonderful guest, Kirsten Oster Zeglaitis, Louise Fox, professor of English at Rice University in Houston, Texas.
Welcome Kirsten, and thank you for being here. Thank you.
I'm delighted to be here. Kirsten is a media scholar, health researcher and technology analyst,
as well as the founder and director of the Rice Medical Humanities Programme and the Medical Futures Lab.
Kirsten is the author of numerous publications, including two outstanding books Medical Visions Producing the Patient through film,
television and Imaging Technologies and Cinematic Prophylaxis.
Globalisation and contagion in the discourse world has at the moment.
Kirsten He's also working on a third book project entitled Quantified, hence learning from patient stories in the age of Big Data.
I am incredibly fascinated and deeply inspired by Kirsten's ability to translate figures and data into meaningful stories,
and I really could not see how not to talk to you today.
So in this brief conversation, I would like to touch upon some of the paradoxes that you have explored in your volume.
Cinematic Prophylaxis published by University Press in 2005.
This book examines images of contagion through the lens of 20th-century film history.
It charts, and I quote the changes and the alarming continuities in popular understandings
of the connexion between pathologize bodies and the global spread of disease,
unquote. Does marking a turning point in the fields of visual culture, public health and medical humanities alike?
So if I could choose a word to describe the ambitious scope of this volume,
I would probably pick the adjective visionary as one that does justice to the book's historical death,
prophetic undertones and theoretical achievements.
So now, given the invisible nature of bacteria and viruses, the visual cinematic lens that constitutes a paradox in its own right.
Could you tell us a bit more about the chosen topic and methodology?
And to what extent do you think is visual culture and not to medium to representative one prefers to translate the invisibility of contagion?
Sure. And thank you so much for that lovely introduction. That was very nice.
The book came about as a result of a couple of key influences.
So before I started grad school, I had taken a couple of years off between finishing undergrad and starting.
And during one of those years I worked as a research assistant in a Department of Public Health,
and there I met a bunch of epidemiologists and I was really fascinated by the way they were.
They were really storytellers, like when you started talking with them, they didn't throw out lots of numbers at you.
They told stories of how they essentially kind of traced pathways backwards in time and space to figure out the origins of a particular phenomenon.
Usually, you know, either a disease outbreak or maybe the source of a chronic disease or something,
and then they would kind of walk you through how it evolved over time.
So it became clear to me that they they were working with data and stories in a very integrated way,
even though we don't really talk about or they don't really talk about what they do in terms of narrative per se.
But from my perspective, that was clear. But this was also in the early 90s when HIV aids was a really huge global concern.
People were talking about it all the time and but I was planning on going to grad school to study cinema and media, and I loved watching old movies.
And I remember seeing the Andromeda Strain, which the original movie.
It's been remade into TV shows and other movies, but the original version, which was made in the 70s watching it at that moment,
it seemed like it was about AIDS, but it obviously wasn't because it was made decades before the AIDS pandemic,
and this kind of led me on this path where I started wondering how is it that we have
the same kinds of representational techniques for different kinds of disease outbreaks?
And what does that mean about the role of representation in the way that we think about disease?
So this this kind of led me into the research that became the book cinematic prophylaxis.
And one of the things I started doing, I became very curious as to whether representations that were made by people in the health sciences,
like in public health or in medicine,
whether they also had any commonalities or whether this was maybe just a Hollywood thing, if it was just a Hollywood thing, I might have imagined.
Well, genres depend on repetition rate with slight variations over time, et cetera.
But then I started wondering, Well, is this genre, you know, just across domains?
Is it also perhaps in public health?
And I started doing research on health films to see how they told stories and the kinds of things that they represented.
And the thing that I started noticing that made it really clear to me the role
the unique role of visual media and visual culture was that there was this.
It really came through in films about contagion, because what you started seeing,
what I started seeing was that even in films going back to the 1920s, the filmmakers, which sometimes included the U.S. Public Health Service,
were trying to teach people to imagine that they could see invisible contagions with their naked eyes, even though of course they couldn't,
so that they could kind of internalise the places or people or actions that could be the source of contagion.
And it was very clear from even way back then that this was kind of a central preoccupation.
You have to. And this is a problem. Of course, this with us right now.
If only we could see. Viruses with our naked eye would be very easy to know what was a dangerous place and what was not
right and when we needed to take extra precautions and when we didn't and all these sorts of things.
So the thing is cinema, you know, moving images, I should say more generally has this ability through special effects to show us things, you know,
whether it's like cartoons, animations or whether it's more elaborate special effects,
which over time became computer generated and that kind of thing.
They can show us things that look like we can actually see them with our eyes because on the screen we can.
And that then allows us to imagine that we can see those things in the world.
So there's something very particular there, and it also really requires motion like movement through space and time.
Right. Because contagion is not a static thing, it only occurs in space and time.
So you put those things together. The moving image occurs through space and time and can visualise things that we can't see with our naked eye,
including blowing things up or speeding things up or slowing things down and all of those kinds of things.
That makes it really a privileged medium that you can't.
You can describe that in words, but you make the kind of to make the invisible seem real in a material sense.
You need a kind of visual form that will allow you to manifest in that way.
Yes. Thank you so much, Kristen. When I was, you were talking.
I was particularly struck by the idea of the moving image as something that is transferred and happens across space and time,
and it is a peculiarity that is inherent to translation as well.
Mm-Hmm. And I was wondering, to what extent can we think of the process of visualisation as a process of translation?
Or are we going too far in allowing translation, the possibility of translation, you know, to to call the two too many meanings of it.
Would you think about it? Oh, I think the translation is a perfect term for that, especially when we're talking about, um,
about creating visualisations of something that has a status in the world of quote unquote objective fact.
Right? So when you think about, um, public health communications, for example, they are supposed to be,
you know, from the point of view of public health experts, science based.
OK. And so, you know, we can talk about the extent to which the discourse of objectivity is itself constructed.
But nonetheless, the idea is that there is a fact.
There's a scientific fact in the world that has been proven,
or at least a hypothesis that is pretty strong that needs to be then communicated to the general public.
And this is widely recognised in science communication as a challenge because scientists communicate in a language
amongst themselves that's very different from the overall mode of discourse in in public or in popular culture.
And so the question there always is, OK, how do you translate complex information that has many nuances to it and that has many caveats,
even perhaps into a form that the general public can not only understand but can remember and can act on?
So for all of these things, there's there's been a lot of research about the way that we.
Need to think about the the visual dimensions and the narrative dimensions of this kind of work because.
We know, though, this hasn't fully been embraced worldwide, I would say, and by all communicators.
But researchers know that having a scientist stand up and present a lecture with all of the relevant
data to the general public is not a good way to communicate information to the general public,
right? We also know there's really interesting research out there about how much more effective
fiction can be than non-fiction in communicating scientific information health information.
Some research has even looked at the role of fictional characters on popular television shows, for example, like Grey's Anatomy,
those kinds of shows, and as well as soap operas and that sort of thing because viewers feel that they already know and trust those figures.
And then they receive the information that is presented as part of a narrative rather than as a set of items that have to be memorised in some way.
So this brings in the question of trust and the extent to which forms of representation do or do not reach us in a way that we find convincing.
And to a large extent, that sense of an image being convincing has to do with a sense of trust in it,
but which itself is a very complex and very culturally specific concept that is not at all universal.
So there are many layers to that to to kind of pull apart and dissect.
But the extent to which there's kind of a layering of how information is being presented by whom in what format that all really
plays into the the extent to which we can make good sense of public health or medical communications or representations.
Thank you, Kirsten. Yes. And Hal, you have explained that right now, contagion poses a series of translation problems.
And at the same time, however, it also confronts us with questions of containment and surveillance,
which seem to be at odds with the translational dimension of economics, politics and culture in today's society.
Could you give us some examples, perhaps, of the ways in which modern cinema has negotiated the tension between globalisation
on the one hand and the control of national boundaries on the others?
And what is the connexion, if any, between contagion and conspiracy?
And how is this connexion unfolding in the current geopolitical discourses?
Yes, thank you that this is a really interesting question,
because national boundaries have have been a central preoccupation of contagion media for a very long time.
And the idea that we can that we can construct boundaries, whether it's around a community,
a village, a kingdom or a continent or an island or a nation,
and thereby keep the healthy people in and keep the infected people out, that that is a very old idea that has come through contagion media.
The challenge and I would answer this now more in relation to contagion media rather than contagion cinema, per se.
The the challenge is partly that the ways that we access and share information, of course,
now are completely networked and do not respect national boundaries of any kind,
except in cases where the flow of certain forms of information are blocked by by state powers, for example.
But by and large, the international flow of information and ideas is it defines the ways that we access information and images now.
So that includes cinema as well as everything else.
But but one of the things this means is that when we think about image based media,
actually most people in the world access information through video forms rather than through text.
So that still is a very prominent and prevalent way that information circulates.
But those videos, unlike the public health films of that I wrote about in cinematic prophylaxis,
the videos that people get their information from which could be on YouTube or Facebook or any place,
they're not necessarily vetted by some centralised authority.
They're not necessarily science driven, and they are capable of spreading ideas, including conspiracy theories,
in ways that actually really challenge the kinds of information that previously organisations like
the W.H.O. had conveyed through films like the films I wrote about in Cinematic Prophylaxis.
So in the 50s, the W.H.O. couldn't make a film about a disease outbreak and send it out all over the world,
and there wouldn't be a lot of competing narratives or visualisations that would be the representation.
And that allowed those kinds of representations a kind of authority that they
just don't have anymore because they're competing with all these other videos,
including conspiracy theories. So actually, you know,
I wrote a paper that was published just earlier this summer that I had written a couple of years ago about Zika virus and conspiracy videos.
And it was really interesting to me to reflect on that piece now because as I looked it over,
I thought that I could go through and replace Zika with COVID, and almost the exact same argument would would hold.
And the argument of that paper was that.
One of the reasons that conspiracy theories, especially as conveyed through visual media, through moving images.
One of the reasons that they posed such a challenge now in relation to contagion disease outbreaks is that those films actually exploit
representational techniques that are much more persuasive than the media produced by science driven organisations like the W.H.O.,
where other kinds of health, health departments or health ministries around the world.
So. In that paper, I looked at two different videos, which were the most widely circulated on Facebook in a particular month of time, it was, I think,
June of leading up to the the Olympics in in Brazil when Zika virus was really
raging and and the the one video that was considered to be sort of legitimate.
It was a press conference and it went on for an hour and it was unedited and it was just scientists sitting at tables presenting facts.
The other one, which was a conspiracy VIDEO It was, I think, six or eight minutes long.
It had music. It was highly edited.
It had big words in colours with sort of graphics around them and images visual images to complement the argumentation
and the whole thing built an argument step by step that didn't make any sense from a scientific point of view.
But rhetorically was incredibly persuasive and most of all was very emotional.
And I think that here this is where this is a dimension of visual representation and more generally
representation of contagion that is extremely important to consider is the role of emotion.
Because when we think about contagion, it's something that it's very hard to treat rationally.
It's something that by definition feels threatening.
Right, so that's already a type of emotional response on some level.
And so the combination of a contagious disease outbreak and a conspiracy theory, really it really amplifies that reliance on emotion,
emotional argumentation in a way that when you compare that to how an organisation like the W.H.O. or the CDC,
how they communicate it falls completely flat. Yes.
Yes, I totally agree with you, contagion, in a sense, enhances that gap between science and vision and evidence.
And on the other hand, the irrationality of what you cannot see and therefore you cannot know.
So yes, thank you. Thank you so much for the illuminating. These mysterious, in a sense way in which we access information and process them.
Mm-Hmm. Yes, and talking about health data more broadly, since he also touched up on this issue,
and as I said, you are working on a project that deal with this topic.
There is a final paradox I would like to discuss with you and to propose to you.
And the paradox that deals with inherently qualitative cultural.
And then we had the narrative nature of quantitative data about health and disease.
In a sense, we can say we are made not just those cells, but those stories.
So what do you think is that meaningful story that the current infection rate recovered cases and that stores are telling us,
how can we translate the language of statistics into relevant language that can help us articulate,
comprehend and perhaps even overcome the coronavirus crisis?
Yes, this this this is the question that preoccupies me right now more than ever, not only because I'm working on a book about this,
about the relation between data and stories, but also because in looking at the contagion media of the COVID outbreak,
it is so apparent how data driven the visualisations are,
which isn't always the same as how as the sort of policy based responses I've been
very struck in the current outbreak by how popular the COVID dashboards are,
the COVID dashboards in the maps.
And this is partly to do with certain technical affordances of the internet and of other open access software for mapping that are
available now that hadn't really been available to quite the same degree for other large outbreaks around the world in recent years.
So I find it really interesting that there are so many COVID maps and so many data visualisations to the extent that this phrase flatten the curve,
right? It's a it's a ubiquitous phrase which only references a data visualisation like it actually doesn't mean anything else in the world.
That curve is a statistical model. Right.
There is there's no curve out there in the world that we're, you know, that's that's three dimensional that we're going to flatten.
Yeah, we're all talking about flattening the curve. Right.
And and so I'm really struck by the the juxtaposition of that preoccupation on the one hand.
And then on the other hand, and especially in the United States,
the absence of images of the people actually suffering from the disease, especially in hospitals.
And this is partly due to restrictions on who can go in the hospitals, partly for safety, partly for privacy.
But also there have been very few images circulating of the total numbers of deaths and the numbers of disabilities, and even more than that.
I was really. Dismayed by how long it took for people, for the discussion of the racial health disparities,
especially in the U.S., to finally become a really central part of the discussion.
And to me, when you think about this question of what are the stories that the data are telling
us or which stories could we pull out that would make a meaningful difference?
I think that in the U.S., most states were not actually recording racial race and ethnicity data as they were recording infections and deaths.
And once that started to become apparent that in fact,
you could track severity of outbreaks in relation to racial and ethnic lack of access to not just health care,
but also to high paying jobs that would allow them to not be in public so much
and other resources that could help protect these communities from exposures.
It starts to actually tell a story about who is vulnerable and why.
That becomes a bigger story when you start to recognise that, in fact, in this outbreak and in every outbreak,
we, the general public are really only as safe and healthy as the most vulnerable amongst us.
So. The story becomes different when you start to see that there are certain parts of the curve right that needs to
be flattened that are invisible by design at certain times and then hyper visible also by design at other times.
So what I mean is that the extent to which racial communities, racialized communities were suffering from COVID was not evident early on.
And as it became evident then,
that narrative was politicised in such a way that those communities were from the point of view of certain politicians blamed for their own illness.
Which brings us back to a long history of racialized contagion, which I which I talk about in cinematic prophylaxis.
And there are there are some different features to the way that that has played out in COVID.
But I think that one of the things that we're seeing now is that there's kind of a growing
recognition that in order to truly establish policies that will help us get beyond this outbreak,
we have to actually give respect and care to the communities that are usually not respected and cared for.
Otherwise, this will never end. This will never end.
So that really then it kind of flips a certain element of contagion media that has been with us for a very long time,
which has tended to treat racialized bodies as these external others that threaten the nation and that are carriers of disease.
And that should be kept out to keep the internal, pure and clean and healthy.
That's like a very old rhetoric of disease and contagion that has been visualised in many public health films.
And and also was part of this in in a different kind of racialisation,
which was xenophobia in in relation to people from China, people from Asian countries in general.
So that's another kind of piece of this whole story.
But I think that in the current moment, you know, looking at this and again, I'm talking about the U.S. situation,
largely because it this has certainly played out differently in different parts of the world.
So I think that in the case of the United States telling the stories that actually are hidden by the statistics,
specifically the questions of who are the most vulnerable and why it sheds a light on society and what is valued in that society.
But then. Gives us some, some possible ways to respond to the pandemic, which force social acknowledgement of things that are usually hidden.
So I think here too, you know, the the framing of kind of visibility and and invisibility and the extent to
which translation of different forms can illuminate things that you can't see.
So the statistics don't tell us the stories of who suffers and why.
But really digging into them and seeing who is actually suffering and what
and why they are in that position in the first place shows us a path forward.
Whether or not there is a social and political will to take it is a different question.
But I think that's one of the things that telling the stories that are embedded in the data can do for us.
But it's also one of the things that the preoccupation with data visualisations hides, because that doesn't put a face on it,
and it doesn't show us the kind of disproportionate pain and suffering that has existed across our society as a whole.
Yes. Thank you, Kirsten, because this reflection really sheds light on doing a sense of the cultural dimension of science because in a sense,
figures in that do not exist in a vacuum. They're always interpreted, created and presented.
Yes, and those in a sense also illuminates the core of translation as an entity, a concept,
a reality that lie lies in between the transfers in space and time questions of trust,
but also the attitude we have towards otherness and foreignness and what and who cannot be seen.
So thank you so much for your tremendous contribution to this series.
And thank you for illuminating some of the paradoxes in which we are living today
and for showing us ways of visualising the invisible bio cultural pass or contagion.
And as always, thank you everyone for listening. Thank you so much, it's been my pleasure.
Thank you.