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9781479811632 Academic Inspection Copy

In Case of Emergency

How Technologies Mediate Crisis and Normalize Inequality
  • ISBN-13: 9781479811632
  • Publisher: NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS
    Imprint: MONTHLY REVIEW PRESS
  • By Elizabeth Ellcessor
  • Price: AUD $60.99
  • Stock: 0 in stock
  • Availability: This book is temporarily out of stock, order will be despatched as soon as fresh stock is received.
  • Local release date: 22/03/2022
  • Format: Paperback 240 pages Weight: 0g
  • Categories: Media studies [JFD]
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A much-needed look at the growth of emergency media and its impact on our lives
In an emergency, we often look to media: to contact authorities, to get help, to monitor evolving situations, or to reach out to our loved ones. Sometimes we arent even aware of an emergency until we are notified by one of the countless alerts, alarms, notifications, sirens, text messages, or phone calls that permeate everyday life. Yet most people have only a partial understanding of how such systems make sense of and act upon an "emergency." In Case of Emergency argues that emergency media are profoundly cultural artifacts that shape the very definition of "emergency" as an opposite of "normal." Looking broadly across a range of contemporary emergency-related devices, practices, and services, Elizabeth Ellcessor illuminates the cultural and political underpinnings and socially differential effects of emergency media.
By interweaving in-depth interviews with emergency-operation and app-development experts, archival materials, and discursive and technological readings of hardware and infrastructures, Ellcessor demonstrates that emergency media are powerful components of American life that are rarely, if ever, neutral. The normalization of ideologies produced and reinforced by emergency media result in unequal access to emergency services and discriminatory assumptions about who or what is a threat and who deserves care and protection. As emergency media undergo massive growth and transformation in response to digitization and attendant entrepreneurial cultures, Ellcessor asks where access, equity, and accountability fit in all of this. The first book to develop a typology of emergency media, In Case of Emergency opens a much-needed conversation around the larger cultural meanings of "emergency," and what an ethical and care-based approach to emergency could entail.

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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