Episode 20: Encounters with Viral Objects: Tracing the Genealogies of the COVID-19 Pandemic


Posted Date: March 18, 2021

Episode Description:  In this episode, LAC member Merve Tabur has a conversation with Dr. Sofia Varino on her “Viral Objects” project which brings together biomedical, ecological, and popular science discourses on the COVID-19 Pandemic. As defined by Dr. Varino, “Viral Objects” are biomedical objects such as masks, vaccines, COVID-19 tests, and Vitamin D supplements that serve a preventative function and invite us to “think ecologically” about the pandemic. Dr. Varino also introduces the “Minor Cosmopolitanisms” framework that informs her scholarship and discusses how issues such as disability rights, environmental justice, and racial justice are central to understanding the different genealogies of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Guest Biography:

Dr. Sofia Varino is a writer and cultural historian based in Berlin. She is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow working with the MINOR COSMOPOLITANISMS research training group at the Department of English & American Studies at the University of Potsdam in Germany. Dr. Varino’s research and teaching interests include cultural history and theory, science and technology studies, political ecology, American studies, and queer and feminist theories. She has published in Somatechnics: Journal of Bodies – Technologies – Power; European Journal of Women’s Studies (EJWS); Women’s Studies Quarterly (WSQ); and Feral Feminisms, and co-edited a special issue of Somatechnics on “Data Matters: (Un)Doing Data and Gender in the Life Sciences” (Edinburgh University Press, 2019). She is currently working on two book-length projects: Viral Ecologies, on the multiple genealogies of the coronavirus pandemic across racial and environmental justice movements; and Aquatopia, on climate politics and aesthetics with May Joseph. She holds a Ph.D. in Cultural Studies with a certificate in Art & Philosophy from the State University of New York (SUNY Stony Brook).

Project Title: “Viral Objects: Ecologies of Contact and Care in a Pandemic Anthropocene”

Project Description:

“What does it mean to live with others in entangled worlds of contingency and uncertainty?” -Dooren, Kurksey & Münster, 2016

From the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, theories about the nonhuman origin of the virus and cross-species transmission were prevalent, bringing to the fore concerns about deforestation and loss of habitat, as well as environmental pollution and access to public healthcare. In Viral Objects, I address these concerns by examining them historically using a transdisciplinary cultural studies methodology that challenges strict divisions between the humanities and the social and natural sciences, seeking to generate connective tissue among disparate disciplinary locations. The project moves beyond the clinical and/or biomedical implications of the coronavirus pandemic to examine its convoluted ecological dimensions in environmental and racial justice contexts. From the zoonotic spillover theory about the origin of COVID-19 respiratory disease in humans to the involvement of air pollution in the development of respiratory symptoms and the environmental benefits of the mitigating “lockdown” strategies adopted worldwide, the coronavirus pandemic has fast become not only a global public health emergency but also, I argue, a site for a specific ecological mode to emerge. What does it mean, then, to think ecologically in pandemic times?

Viral Objects participates in the necessarily transdisciplinary fields of environmental and medical humanities, science and technology studies, history of science and medicine, and the emerging field of multispecies studies, which animates the project with an unsettling question: “What does it mean to live with others in entangled worlds of contingency and uncertainty?” (Dooren, Kurksey, Münster, 2016). This multispecies living-with – this fast-paced circulation across globally networked economic, clinical, and ecological – is what I keep returning to throughout the project. As the editors of the Environmental Humanities special issue dedicated to Multispecies Studies remind us, “Life cannot arise and be sustained in isolation. But relationships also have histories. Beyond a static ecological exchange, like the energy circuits mapped by early ecologists, organisms are situated within deep, entangled histories” (Dooren, Kiksey, Münster, 2016: 2). Tracing genealogies of the coronavirus pandemic where the clinical and the ecological have converged, Viral Objects considers how these deep, entangled histories demand the decentering of a normative “human” species position while proposing a reorientation towards other life forms and life worlds.

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Recommended Texts:

  • Edna Bonhomme, “Ill Will,” The Baffler Magazine, April 2020
  • Evelynn Hammonds, Childhood’s Deadly Scourge: The Campaign to Control Diphtheria in New York City, 1880-1930, 1999
  • Emily Martin, Flexible Bodies: Tracking Immunity in American Culture from the Days of Polio to the Age of AIDS, 1994
  • Mel Y. Chen, “Feminisms in the Air,” Signs Journal, 2020
  • Ludwik Fleck, Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact, 1979 [1935]
  • Priscilla Walk, Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative, 2008