Bishnupriya Ghosh: The Blood Files

Bishnupriya Ghosh
The Blood Files: clinical translations of a vital medium

Transkulturelle Studien

Bishnupriya Ghosh addresses what “transculturality” might mean in context of the new materialist turn in science studies. If the critical emphasis falls on the human and non-human interactions and relations, this orientation directs our gaze to scientific practices that “make and “remake” objects like genes, toxins, or microbes. Focusing on one vital medium, Ghosh examines its material construction in two forms: frozen blood samples (at biorepositories) and patient blood pictures (at clinics), both necessary for tracking viral distributions in individual hosts.
Her research concerns the chronic blood surveillance in the HIV/AIDS post-antiretrovitral era: blood samples and blood pictures sequenced in the blood files are essential for keeping abreast of infection. Ghosh stops at three different settings where blood is denatured and fabricated as it moves through the vast global public health infrastructure. One is the Center for AIDS Research biorepository in Seattle and the others are two clinics, the Sanjeevani outfit (Mumbai) and the “HIV Adherence Club” (Cape Town). Since “clinical translations” of blood produces very different compositions at these sites, one might ask: How might transculturality inform our understanding of these forms? Where do the processes of clinical translation and transculturation intersect?

Tracking this highly symbolic medium as it is denatured and fabricated requires close attention to the different processes of “clinical translation” that construct blood differently at each site. Ghosh’s critical method probes what technical-aesthetic compositions of this vital medium might imply for the ecological study of human and non-human relations. What does blood rife with biotic and chemical agents tell us about our “emerging with” the environment? How does transculturality as a conceptual framework enable such an ecological orientation open to unthinking anthropomorphism?

Bishnupriya Ghosh teaches global media at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her current work on media, risk, and globalization includes the co-edited Routledge Companion to Media and Risk (Routledge 2020) and a new monograph, The Virus Touch: Theorizing Epidemic Media (under contract with Duke University Press).

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