Covid-19 and Pandemics
Below you will find a collection of my academic publications which center around Covid-19 and pandemics.
Pandemics and the Media
By Marina Levina
Published by Peter Lang Press in 2015
Marina Levina’s Pandemics and the Media (2015) offers a critical examination of how media representations of pandemics shape cultural understandings of disease, identity, and global crises. Through textual analysis of various media texts, Levina argues that these narratives are instrumental in constructing and disseminating stories that reflect and influence societal perceptions of health and difference.
Biocitizenship: The Politics of Bodies, Governance, and Power
Edited by Kelly E. Happe, Jenell Johnson and Marina Levina
Published by New York University Press in 2018
Biocitizenship: The Politics of Bodies, Governance, and Power, edited by Kelly E. Happe, Jenell Johnson, and Marina Levina, is a comprehensive anthology that examines how biological life—particularly health, illness, and the body—has become central to modern forms of citizenship and governance. Drawing on the concept of “biocitizenship” as articulated by Nikolas Rose, the book explores how individuals and groups are defined, regulated, and empowered through biological criteria, often in ways that reflect broader social inequalities.
Conceptualizing “the end” of COVID-19: temporality and linear mobilization toward health
By Ryan Tabrizi and Marina Levina
Published in Review of Communication, Vol. 22, No. 2 (2022)
The journal article “Conceptualizing ‘the End’ of COVID-19: Temporality and Linear Mobilization Toward Health” by Ryan Tabrizi and Marina Levina critiques dominant media and public health narratives that frame the end of the COVID-19 pandemic as a linear journey from “darkness” (crisis) to “light” (cure or endemic normalcy). The authors argue that this linear and Western-centric conceptualization of health masks deep-rooted social inequalities and reinforces structures of whiteness, ableism, and neoliberal individualism.
Queering Intimacy, Six Feet Apart
By Marina Levina
Published in QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking, Vol. 7, No. 3 (2020)
The article “Queering Intimacy, Six Feet Apart” by Marina Levina, published in QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking (Fall 2020), critically examines how public health messaging during the COVID-19 pandemic promotes a sanitized, heteronormative, and depoliticized version of intimacy under the guise of safety.
COVID and Essential Workers: Medical Crises and the Rhetorical Strategies of Disposability
By Marina Levina in Emily Winderman, Allison L. Rowland, and Jennifer Malkowski's Covid And...: How To Do Rhetoric in a Pandemic. Published in 2023 by Michigan State University Press.
The Association for the Rhetoric of Science, Technology, andMedicine2024 Book of the Year Award
Marina Levina argues that during the COVID-19 pandemic, the label “essential” became a rhetorical tool that justified the sacrifice and disposability of marginalized workers. The discourse of heroism and care obscured structural inequalities and enabled the biopolitical and necropolitical control of laboring bodies, particularly those of racialized and immigrant workers. Essentiality, she contends, is not the opposite of disposability—it is its prerequisite in a capitalist system predicated on exploitation.