Writing & Society Research Centre seminar

Peta Mitchell (QUT) & James Gourley (WSU) present papers on Simulating Contagion - In 2017, the World Bank ran a series of four pandemic simulations—involving high-level government officials from a dozen countries and major health organisations—to highlight and, as it were, make manifest the looming threat of infectious disease outbreaks in a hyperconnected world. Around the same time as the last of these World Bank simulations, the BBC launched its Contagion! The BBC Four Pandemic project, which used user-contributed mobile app data to simulate the spread of an influenza pandemic across the UK. Finally, and again in late 2017, Ndemic Creations, the makers of the wildly popular pandemic simulation app Plague Inc., announced that the game's player base had reached 100 million worldwide. To date the Plague Inc. app, which was launched in 2012, remains at #2 in Apple’s App Store Simulation category, behind Minecraft. Contagion and simulation have had a long and complex history, one that feeds into this highly contemporary fascination with simulating contagion and that, in some instances, verges on an imperative. In this talk, and through a range of cultural texts, I explore the ways in which these entanglements between contagion and simulation enact a form of speculative parasite (or microbial) logic that works to recast the human in a more-than-human world.