Date and Time: March 16 Thursday, 6pm IST
Venue: AB 6/201
Title: Monster Soup and Floating Bubbles: Cartoonists’ response to health crises from the time of Miasma to the COVID pandemic.
Description: Can we use cartoons and comics based on an emergency like an epidemic or pandemic to analyse paradigm shifts and epistemic shifts in the history of disease transmission? How have social actors like scientists, everyday people, news media and non-human entities like microbes reflected in cartoons and comics from the birth of modern cartooning in nineteenth-century Britain to the present? This talk will address these questions by summarising cartoonists’ responses to health crises, mainly focusing on pathogen-led disease transmission.
Bio: Argha Manna is a cancer researcher turned science cartoonist. He explores the historical perspectives of scientific development and social issues through the dual lenses of artist and researcher, bridging the gap between academic research and visual storytelling. Argha is the first Artist-in-Residence at IIT Gandhinagar. He also works as a visiting artist fellow with the Fluid Dynamics of Disease Transmission Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Currently, Argha is working on his first monograph on the history of airborne disease transmission research in comics form.
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