Disease, communication, and the ethics of (in) visibility.

As the recent Ebola outbreak demonstrates, visibility is central to the shaping of political, medical, and socioeconomic decisions. The symposium in this issue of the Journal of Bioethical Inquiry explores the uneasy relationship between the necessity of making diseases visible, the mechanisms of legal and visual censorship, and the overall ethics of viewing and spectatorship, including the effects of media visibility on the perception of particular "marked" bodies. Scholarship across the disciplines of communication, anthropology, gender studies, and visual studies, as well as a photographer's visual essay and memorial reflection, throw light on various strategies of visualization and (de)legitimation and link these to broader socioeconomic concerns.