Hidden racism and structures of power in the images of Ebola 2014

Clara Méndez Hernández ^[2] ; Francisco Tirado ^[1]
1. [1] Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
  
  Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
  
  Barcelona, España
2. [2] Investigadora en psicología social
Localización: Digithum: A relational perspective on culture and society, ISSN-e 1575-2275, Nº. 27, 2021 (Ejemplar dedicado a: Dossier: Descifrar la sociología de la COVID-19: pandemias, riesgos biológicos y la sociedad del coronavirus)
Idioma: inglés
Enlaces
- Texto completo (pdf)

Resumen
- Epidemics are considered paradigmatic states of emergency and humanitarian scenarios. Thus, humanitarian conceptualizations are negotia-ble through the very practices appearing in this type of emergency.This paper aims to investigate this process in relation to the 2014 Ebola outbreak, an event that is considered a global threat and an intolerable humanitarian situation. We analyze how the definition of what can be understood (or not) as humanity was constructed through visual representations produced by social media. We will also discuss how the definition of humanity was negotiated through dimensions such as the spectrum of visibility, the distribution of agencies, the affections intended to provoke, and the imaginaries defined. This paper is based on an empirical semiotic analysis of hundreds of images from the 2014 Ebola epidemic and 15 focus groups and individual interviews, performed over a span of one year, discussing images from social media.