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Plague Inc. is an enduringly popular mobile video game in which players create diseases and attempt to eradicate humanity; it has been downloaded more than 60 million times and been met with largely positive critical reception, with many reviews praising the game as a ‘realistic outbreak simulator’. This article explores Plague Inc. as both an artifact, and productive, of ‘pandemic culture’, a social imaginary that describes how the threat of pandemic increasingly shapes our day-to-day life. Ludic and narrative elements of the game were identified and selected for analysis, along with paratexts surrounding the game. Three aspects of Plague Inc. were used to structure the analysis: its politics of global scale, its viral realism, and its visual culture of contagion. The article examines how the ways in which Plague Inc. articulates ideas about pandemic may not only explain the game’s immense success but also provide insights into public perceptions and popular discourses about disease threats. The article argues that the game is an incomplete text that depends on preexisting familiarity with other disease media. It concludes that the popularity and longevity of Plague Inc., as well as its broader social relevance, can be explained by placing it within the context of public anxieties about vulnerability to infectious diseases.

In 1998, Chicago physicist Richard Seed's announcement that he would clone a human being set off an international media furor that revealed important insights into our understandings of biotechnology, scientists, and governmental regulation of genetic research. This study examines English-language media coverage of Seed over a 5-year period, tracing how his initial framing as a "mad scientist" was quickly contained and managed by the scientific community through his reframing as a "bad scientist." Amid media calls for a response from government regulators, it became apparent that the state has failed to adequately prepare itself and the public for the eventuality of human cloning, a failure of biogovernance. This article discusses how three tensions in current biogovernmental practice were made visible once Seed was read as a biogovernmental event.

This article examines the persistence of the handshake in business circles despite its implication in the spread of communicable disease in contemporary pandemic culture. An examination of business etiquette discourse suggests that even during disease outbreaks or flu season, the business handshake remains an important visual and haptic legal gesture. While it may no longer produce a binding legal contract, it stages the parties as contractable subjects, as claiming the status of autonomous individuals committed to defining their intersubjective relationship through the norms of contract. The business handshake thus operates as a cultural site for the complex interaction of bodies and law, and the production of masculine, haptic-legal subjectivity.

Background  Public health posters exhorting viewers to wash their hands to prevent the spread of communicable disease are common in airports, shopping malls, hospitals, and workplaces. Yet the poster remains understudied by scholars working in communication, health, and governance.Analysis  Analyzing a large corpus of Canadian public health posters targeting handwashing, this article identifies three themes: the articulation of an embodied pedagogy aimed at daily practices; the recognition of our body surfaces and those of people and things around us as contaminated skins; and the production of haptic visuality. Conclusion and implications  These posters promote a habitus of hygiene, inviting us to modify our haptic etiquette, to see, know, and inhabit our bodies differently, and to imagine and interact with our environment on new terms.Contexte Il est normal de voir dans les aéroports, les centres commerciaux, les hôpitaux et les lieux de travail des affiches encourageant les gens à se laver les mains afin de prévenir la propagation de maladies transmissibles. En revanche, il n’existe pas beaucoup d’études de telles affiches par les chercheurs en communication, en soins de la santé ou en administration publique.Analyse  À partir de l’analyse d’un grand échantillon d’affiches canadiennes sur le besoin de se laver les mains, cet article identifie trois thèmes : l’articulation d’une pédagogie corporelle visant les pratiques quotidiennes; a reconnaissance de la surface de son corps ainsi que celle des corps d’autrui et des objets environnants comme sources de contamination; et la production d’une visualité haptique.Conclusions et implications  Ces affiches promeuvent un habitus d’hygiène, nous invitant à modifier notre étiquette haptique pour que nous voyions, connaissions et expérimentions notre corps différemment et pour que nous reconcevions notre environnement et interagissions avec lui d’une nouvelle manière.

If you win, you win in one of two ways. Some make their final move, throw “check-mate” in their opponent’s face, laugh. Some say nothing, show nothing, simply sit and watch as the other player discovers just exactly what has happened. Some win the first way, others the second. So, it’s okay to laugh at the loss of another, and it’s okay to show nothing at all, but what you must never do is look pleased with yourself. Because this implies that there might have been some doubt, some question of the other prevailing. —Murray Logan (71)

How to govern in the face of radical diversity and seemingly intractable conflict? A key question after 9/11, it is also central to dark fantasy literature. The literary answer is a return to legal rational authority, specifically bureaucracy. We examine the novel, Benighted (Kit Whitfield), where the Department for the Ongoing Regulation of Lycanthropic Activity must manage relations between the dominant lycanthropes and the despised underclass of humans. Developing other attempts to theorize the monster in relation to bureaucracy, we suggest that within the novel bureaucrats and the bureau function as ''hopeful monsters,'' sites for the ongoing negotiation of morality.

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