Elizabeth Ellcessor is Associate Professor in Media Studies at the University of Virginia and a Senior Faculty Fellow at the Miller Center. She is the author of Restricted Access: Media, Disability, and the Politics of Participation and co-editor of Disability Media Studies.
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Description
In this moment, in which everything and nothing are simultaneously defined using the language of emergency, Elizabeth Ellcessor's book is resonant, brilliant, timely, and compassionate, and helps to chart a way forward. Her analysis of emergency media and how they express specific articulations of technology, culture, and power as well as their connection to existing forms of white supremacy, disability justice, and misogyny are rigorous, and explain how our understandings of emergencies and the media with which we communicate that information have life and death stakes. * Shoshana Magnet, author of When Biometrics Fail: Gender, Race, and the Technology of Identity * Sirens blare. Maps blaze in alarming colors. Phones buzz stridently as pop-up alerts invade the screen. Media technologies index the presence of an emergency, putting us on alert, entreating us to leap into protective action. Yet as Elizabeth Ellcessor argues cogently in her timely, alarming, and ultimately reparative book, emergency media and the workers operating them also have the power to construct emergency-to cultivate panic, to amplify risk, to signal when we've tipped over into some unacceptably harmful, destructive, or costly deviation from the norm. Emergency media inform how 'normality' is defined, and whose norms become the standard. It thus has the capacity, as Ellcessor shows us, to cultivate a new norm that's more inclusive, just, and compassionate. * Shannon Mattern, author of Code and Clay, Data and Dirt: Five Thousand Years of Urban Media *