Notes
271 Notes Introduction: Transcultural Flows, Communication, and Rhetorics during a Global Epidemic 1. Panic buying refers to the act of a large number of people rushing to purchase large amounts of limited and often special types of products because of the fear of health, environmental, or manufacturing crises, a possible huge price increase, or potential shortage of those goods. For instance, panic buying of vinegar , antiviral drugs, rice, cooking oil, and water took place in Guangdong and Beijing when people learned about the atypical pneumonia amid official silence. While some existing research labels such acts as irrational and unreasonable responses to crises, I argue that emotions and values should function as integral parts of decision-making processes of risk communication and risk management instead of being condemned as interfering noises that should be excluded from such processes. 2. I use the two terms transcultural communication and transcultural rhetorics interchangeably in the rest of the book because I consider them closely interconnected and intricately related. 3. Appadurai defines ethnoscape as the landscape of persons who constitute the shifting world in which we live: “tourists, immigrants, refugees, exiles, guest workers, and other moving groups and individuals constitute an essential feature of the world and appear to affect the politics of (and between) nations” (33). Ethnoscapes are driven by “increasingly complex relationships among money flows, political possibilities, and the availability of both un- and highly-skilled labor” (34). Technoscape refers to the “global configuration of technologies and the fact that technologies, both high and low, both mechanical and informational, now move at high speeds across various kinds of previously impervious boundaries” (Appadurai 34). Financescape refers to the global movement of capital, which “is a more mysterious , rapid, and difficult landscape to follow than ever before, as current markets , national stock exchanges, and commodity speculations move megamonies 272 Notes through national turnstiles at blinding speed, with vast, absolute implications for small differences in percentage points and time units” (Appadurai 34). 4. Here and throughout the rest of the book, the terms biopolitics and biopower are used in the Foucauldian sense. Foucault defines biopower as technologies on the body at two levels: “the regulatory technology of life” at the population level and “the disciplinary technology of the body” at the individual level (Society 249). The regulatory technology employs biological and statistic tools to exert bioregulation by the state, as reflected in “a whole series of mechanisms,” such as health-insurance systems, child care, pension systems, epidemic prevention, and rule of hygiene to promote the longevity and productivity of the population (Society 251). Managing life, growth, health, and the care of the population, biopower brings “life and its mechanisms into the realm of explicit calculations and made knowledge/power an agent of the transformation of human life” (Foucault, History of Sexuality 143). Medicine, in turn, becomes a political intervention technique that links the scientific knowledge of biological processes related to the population and disciplinary processes related to individuals. For Foucault, biopolitics and its associated technologies, as the counterpart of disciplinary technologies, manage the population as a scientific and political problem for the state through the use of mechanisms, such as forecasts, statistical estimates, and overall measures. It “derive[s] its knowledge from, and define[s] its power’s field of intervention in terms of the birth rate, the mortality rate, various biological disabilities, and the effects of the environment” (Society 245). In addition to managing the “universal” phenomena of populations and health, it also intervenes in the “accidental” events of epidemics (Society 245). 5. Extreme case sampling method is a type of purposeful sampling, a method often used to select participants in qualitative studies. Purposeful sampling attempts to select information-rich case for study and allows arguments about “the validity of in-depth qualitative findings” (588). Patricia Goubil-Gambrell states: “Extreme case sampling focuses are subjects who are unusual or special in some ways. The logic is that ‘lessons must be learned about unusual conditions or extreme outcomes’ that are relevant to typical cases” (588). She offers the study of both novice writers and experienced writers as an example of extreme case sampling. 6. Throughout the book, the two terms health risk communication and risk communication are used interchangeably because they share many similarities in terms of communication channels, approaches, and potential pitfalls. As a subgenre of risk communication, health risk communication about global epidemics has received relatively little attention, and this book contributes to the existing understanding about how emergency health risk communication operates in...
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