Pathogens and Populations: Representing Infectious Disease

Infectious diseases are too small to see and too large to fathom. Biologically, microscopic invaders, viruses even smaller than our cells, can travel across the planet and infect billions of humans. Socially, individual contacts have the potential to devastate families, fracture communities, and decimate whole civilizations. How can we comprehend, let alone make meaningful decisions about, complex multi-scale systems of people and pathogens?The main way we try to understand infectious diseases is putting them into other forms that straddle these scales, in short, representing them. To address the resulting representational problems, this course explores a range of scientific and cultural representations of disease. We will ask: What are the underlying assumptions and limits made in our attempts to describe a pathogen spreading through a population? How can board games, mathematical models, and oral histories show the randomness behind catastrophic outbreaks? Or, how might a network model illustrate the way HIV spreads among characters in a novel? How does the epidemiological case study rely on the same principles as tabloid stories about "superspreaders" like Typhoid Mary?The goal of the course is to understand and critique the ways infectious disease is represented, and especially to understand what and who is excluded in different modes of representation. This course is appropriate for students interested in public health, medicine, life writing, science writing, history of science, and media studies. In addition to scientific papers, course material will include plays, poems, board games, comics, novels, oral narratives, and newspaper articles.