ORCID Profile
0000-0003-2658-4430
Current Organisation
UNSW Sydney
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Research Topics
In Research Link Australia (RLA), "Research Topics" refer to ANZSRC FOR and SEO codes. These topics are either sourced from ANZSRC FOR and SEO codes listed in researchers' related grants or generated by a large language model (LLM) based on their publications.
Top 5 Research Topics
ANZSRC Field of Research (FoR)
Sociology | Communication Technology and Digital Media Studies | Communication and Media Studies | Consumption And Everyday Life | Sociology Not Elsewhere Classified | Sociology and Social Studies of Science and Technology | Cultural Policy Studies | Social and Cultural Anthropology | Medicine, Nursing and Health Curriculum and Pedagogy | Social Change | Law and Society | Social Theory | Curriculum and Pedagogy | Communication And Media Studies | Health Promotion | Policy and Administration | Social And Cultural Geography | Justice And Legal Studies Not Elsewhere Classified | Physical Education and Development Curriculum and Pedagogy | Social Policy And Planning
ANZSRC Socio-Economic Objective (SEO)
Expanding Knowledge through Studies of Human Society | Studies in human society | Child health | National identity | Civics and citizenship | Health and Support Services not elsewhere classified | The Media | Teaching and Instruction Technologies | Youth/child development and welfare | Evaluation of Health Outcomes | Structure, Delivery and Financing of Community Services | Behaviour and health |
Related Links
Publications
Is there life after Foucault? Poststructuralism and the health social sciences
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 12-02-2010
The Internet of Things: Social dimensions
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 13-01-2020
DOI: 10.1111/SOC4.12770
The Construction of Patienthood in Medical Advertising
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 10-1993
DOI: 10.2190/FPDH-CXKD-RJH3-8REJ
Abstract: The purpose of this study was to investigate the dominant symbolic elements, themes, and discourses used in drug advertisements published in a weekly magazine directed toward physicians. The discussion is concerned with both the visual signs and textual format of the advertisements, analyzing their attempts to create images around the drugs that appeal to the medical readership of the magazine. With the premise that the producers of the advertisements drew upon shared knowledge and belief systems of their medical audience to create a meaningful image for the drugs, the focus of the article is upon the portrayal of patients in the advertisements, with particular interest in gendered representations. The author argues that the way in which patients are portrayed visually and verbally in such advertisements is revealing of the ideological dimension of the doctor-patient relationship within the biomedical system of healing, including notions of the mechanical man and the vulnerable woman as archetypal patients.
Drought, fire, and rainforest endemics: A case study of two threatened frogs impacted by Australia's “Black Summer”
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 05-2023
DOI: 10.1002/ECE3.10069
Abstract: Deepening droughts and unprecedented wildfires are at the leading edge of climate change. Such events pose an emerging threat to species maladapted to these perturbations, with the potential for steeper declines than may be inferred from the gradual erosion of their climatic niche. This study focused on two species of hibians— Philoria kundagungan and Philoria richmondensis (Limnodynastidae)—from the Gondwanan rainforests of eastern Australia that were extensively affected by the “Black Summer” megafires of 2019/2020 and the severe drought associated with them. We sought to assess the impact of these perturbations by quantifying the extent of habitat affected by fire, assessing patterns of occurrence and abundance of calling males post‐fire, and comparing post‐fire occurrence and abundance with that observed pre‐fire. Some 30% of potentially suitable habitat for P. kundagungan was fire affected, and 12% for P. richmondensis . Field surveys revealed persistence in some burnt rainforest however, both species were detected at a higher proportion of unburnt sites. There was a clear negative effect of fire on the probability of site occupancy, abundance and the probability of persistence for P. kundagungan . For P. richmondensis , effects of fire were less evident due to the limited penetration of fire into core habitat however, occupancy rates and abundance of calling males were depressed during the severe drought that prevailed just prior to the fires, with the reappearance of calling males linked to the degree of rehydration of breeding habitat post‐fire. Our results highlight the possibility that severe negative impacts of climate change for montane rainforest endemics may be felt much sooner than commonly anticipated under a scenario of gradual (decadal‐scale) changes in mean climatic conditions. Instead, the increased rate of severe stochastic events places these narrow range species at a heightened risk of extinction in the near‐term.
Young People’s Use of Digital Health Technologies in the Global North: Narrative Review (Preprint)
Publisher: JMIR Publications Inc.
Date: 17-02-2020
Abstract: erse array of digital technologies are available to children and young people living in the Global North to monitor, manage, and promote their health and well-being. his article provides a narrative literature review of the growing number of social research studies published over the past decade that investigate the types of digital technologies used by children and young people in the Global North, in addition to investigating which of these technologies they find most useful or not useful. Key findings as well as major gaps and directions for future research are identified and discussed. comprehensive search of relevant publications listed in Google Scholar was conducted, supported by following citation trails of these publications. The findings are listed under type of digital technology used for health: cross-media, internet, social media, apps and wearable devices, sexual health support and information, and mental health support and information. any young people in the Global North are active users of digital health technologies. However, it is notable that they still rely on older technologies, such as websites and search engines, to find information. Apps and platforms that may not have been specifically developed for young people as digital health resources often better suit their needs. Young people appreciate the ready availability of information online, the opportunities to learn more about their bodies and health states, and the opportunities to learn how to improve their health and physical fitness. They enjoy being able to connect with peers, and they find emotional support and relief from distress by using social media platforms, YouTube, and online forums. Young people can find the vast reams of information available to them difficult to navigate. They often look to trusted adults to help them make sense of the information they find online and to provide alternative sources of information and support. Face-to-face interactions with these trusted providers remain important to young people. Risks and harms that young people report from digital health use include becoming overly obsessed with their bodies’ shape and size when using self-tracking technologies and comparing their bodies with the social media influencers they follow. urther details on how young people are using social media platforms and YouTube as health support resources and for peer-to-peer sharing of information, including attention paid to the content of these resources and the role played by young social media influencers and microcelebrities, would contribute important insights to this body of literature. The role played by visual media, such as GIFs (Graphics Interchange Format) and memes, and social media platforms that have recently become very popular with young people (eg, Snapchat and TikTok) in health-related content creation and sharing requires more attention by social researchers seeking to better understand young people’s use of digital devices and software for health and fitness.
Medicine as Culture: Illness, Disease and the Body
Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
Date: 2012
Back to Bedlam? Chelmsford and the Press
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 03-1993
DOI: 10.3109/00048679309072133
Abstract: The Australian press played a vital part in bringing the events at Chelmsford Private Hospital to the attention of the general public, and in pressuring the New South Wales government to institute a Royal Commission into Deep Sleep Therapy. This paper describes the ways in which the press brought Chelmsford events onto the public agenda. It pays particular attention to aspects of the press coverage of the findings of the Royal Commission. The paper identifies the discourses concerning psychiatric care, the doctor-patient relationship and the role of the government in regulating the medical profession which were dominant in press accounts of Chelmsford. It is argued that while pre-existing stereotypes about mad psychiatrists and asylums were used to describe Chelmsford, more confronting ideas concerning the need for medical regulation and patient consumerism received press attention and therefore a public airing. The implications for psychiatric care in Australia are examined.
Sociomaterialities of health, risk and care during COVID-19: Experiences of Australians living with a medical condition
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 2022
Fat Politics: Collected Writings
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 2013
DOI: 10.2139/SSRN.2273419
Digital Sociology: An Introduction
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 2012
DOI: 10.2139/SSRN.2273418
Configuring Maternal, Preborn and Infant Embodiment
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 2012
DOI: 10.2139/SSRN.2273416
The diverse domains of quantified selves: self-tracking modes and dataveillance
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 02-01-2016
Consuming Work: Computers, Subjectivity and Appropriation in the University Workplace
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 11-1998
Abstract: The introduction of technologies has long been a central issue in the sociology of work. This has, however, largely been analysed in terms of worker displacement, deskilling and management control, while little empirical work has focused on questions concerning subjectivity. Current interest in Foucauldian approaches to questions of work and identity has remained primarily theoretical in nature and similarly lacks a sustained discussion of agency. Recent work on the relation between consumption and work has begun to provide a more nuanced framework for discussing the context-specific forms of appropriation in the workplace and their relation to workplace subjectivities. This article, based on a study of in iduals' relationships with the personal computer in the university workplace, adopts a consumption-based approach to explore the complex interplay between subjectivity, technology and work. It examines how the introduction of the personal computer articulates with the interweaving of a ‘professional self’ and a sense of self drawn from the non-work realm. These different subjectivities relate to different tactics of appropriation: appropriation by mastery and by domestication of the work environment. Technologies themselves, however, also participate in the reconfiguration of work spaces and routines, involving questions of competence, knowledge and power, time and space, and the boundaries between home and work, in the new environments of computerised academia.
A postmodern public health?
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 1998
DOI: 10.1111/J.1467-842X.1998.TB01134.X
Abstract: Target temperature management (TTM) is often used in patients after cardiac arrest, but the effects of cooling on cerebral microcirculation, oxygenation and metabolism are poorly understood. We studied the time course of these variables in a healthy swine model. Fifteen invasively monitored, mechanically ventilated pigs were allocated to sham procedure (normothermia, NT In HT animals, cerebral functional capillary density (FCD) and proportion of small-perfused vessels (PSPV) significantly decreased over time during the cooling phase concomitantly, PbtO In healthy animals, TTM can be associated with alterations in cerebral microcirculation during cooling and altered metabolism at rewarming.
Bioacoustic Monitoring Reveals the Calling Activity of an Endangered Mountaintop Frog (Philoria kundagungan) in Response to Environmental Conditions
Publisher: MDPI AG
Date: 15-08-2023
DOI: 10.3390/D15080931
Abstract: Amphibians are the most endangered class of vertebrate on Earth. Knowledge of their ecology is crucial to their conservation however, many species have received scant attention from researchers, particularly in regions that are difficult to access or when traditional monitoring methods are impractical. In recent years, technological advancements in environmental audio collection techniques and signal detection algorithms (i.e., call recognition) have created a new set of tools for examining the ecology of hibians. This study utilises these recent technological advancements to examine the calling phenology of a poorly known Australian mountain frog (Philoria kundagungan). Audio recordings and meteorological data were collected from six localities across the species range, with recordings made every hour for ten minutes between July 2016 and March 2018. We developed an audio recognition algorithm that detected over 1.8 million P. kundagungan calls in 8760 h of audio recordings with a true positive rate of 95%. Our results suggest that calling activity was driven by substrate temperature and precipitation, which has potential consequences for the species as the climate warms and seasonal precipitation patterns shift under climate change. With this detailed knowledge of P. kundagungan calling phenology, this difficult-to-find species will now be more reliably detected, removing a barrier that has hindered efforts to study and conserve this species.
AIDS and the popular media: A new perspective at Florence
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 10-1991
‘All Red in the Face’: Students' Views on School-Based HIV/AIDS and Sexuality Education
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 05-1996
DOI: 10.1111/J.1467-954X.1996.TB00424.X
Abstract: School-based HIV/AIDS and sexuality education is a fraught area, the site of struggles around moral values, knowledge, the nature of childhood and adolescence and pedagogy. The dominant discourses on HIV/AIDS and sexuality education in Australian secondary schools, as evident in policy documents, are currently predominantly libertarian and therapeutic, ch ioning the need for ‘openness’ in the interests of the students' emotional maturity and social responsibility and their good health. However, policy does not always translate readily into practice. This article draws upon a study involving focus group discussions with Australian senior high school students concerning their responses to the school-based HIV/AIDS and sexuality education programmes in which they have taken part and other sources of knowledge about HIV/AIDS. The article focuses in detail upon the students' valorizing of openness, trust and expertise in the face of the embarrassment, their perception of surveillance and their fears of lack of confidentiality that characterize their experience of HIV/AIDS and sexuality education. It is concluded that the nature of the teacher-adolescent relationship tends to work against the achievement of the objectives of such education.
Fabricated data bodies: Reflections on 3D printed digital body objects in medical and health domains
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date: 23-04-2015
DOI: 10.1057/STH.2015.3
Social and Cultural Perspectives on Health, Technology and Medicine
Publisher: Routledge
Date: 22-02-2016
Blurring the boundaries: breastfeeding and maternal subjectivity
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 03-2001
Data assemblages, sentient schools and digitised health and physical education (response to Gard)
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 10-2014
Risk as Moral Danger: The Social and Political Functions of Risk Discourse in Public Health
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 07-1993
DOI: 10.2190/16AY-E2GC-DFLD-51X2
Abstract: Risk is a concept with multiple meanings and is ideologically loaded. The author reviews the literature on risk perception and risk as a sociocultural construct, with particular reference to the domain of public health. Pertinent ex les of the political and moral function of risk discourse in public health are given. The author concludes that risk discourse is often used to blame the victim, to displace the real reasons for ill-health upon the in idual, and to express outrage at behavior deemed socially unacceptable, thereby exerting control over the body politic as well as the body corporeal. Risk discourse is redolent with the ideologies of mortality, danger, and ine retribution. Risk, as it is used in modern society, therefore cannot be considered a neutral term.
Lay discourses and beliefs related to food risks: an Australian perspective
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 05-2005
DOI: 10.1111/J.1467-9566.2005.00451.X
Abstract: Much publicity has been given to risks associated with food in Western countries. This article draws on an Australian research study using qualitative interviews to investigate discourses and beliefs related to food risks among lay people. It was found that the interviewees were most concerned about dietary fat as a risky substance related to overweight, both because of health reasons and physical appearance. A secondary concern they identified was the processing of foodstuffs and 'unnatural' additives. The dominant discourses which were commonly used to organise people's ideas included those concerning 'trying' to consume the 'right' kinds of foods, the importance of 'balance', the notion of food as 'functional' for bodily health, the 'blame' that often accompanied moral judgements about the diet of people with serious illnesses such as cancer and the 'battle' and need for 'control' that people with children referred to in relation to making sure that their children consumed a healthy diet. Most people were willing to invest their trust in government bodies and health professionals to provide accurate information about food risks, as well as trusting their own judgement. The relevance of the Australian cultural context for these findings is discussed.
The 'ear' and 'eye' digital divide
Publisher: Springer US
Date: 2003
Discourses and practices related to suntanning and solar protection among young Australians
Publisher: Oxford University Press (OUP)
Date: 1996
DOI: 10.1093/HER/11.2.147
Panic computing: The viral metaphor and computer technology
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 10-1994
The materialities and embodiments of mundane software: exploring how apps come to matter in everyday life
Publisher: Emerald
Date: 08-07-2022
Abstract: In this article, the authors aim to explore mobile apps as both mundane and extraordinary digital media artefacts, designed and promoted to improve or solve problems in people's lives. Drawing on their “App Stories” project, the authors elaborate on how the efficiencies and affordances credited to technologies emerge and are performed through the specific embodied practices that constitute human–app relationships. The project involved short written accounts in an online survey from 200 Australian adults about apps. Analysis was conducted from a sociomaterial perspective, surfacing the emotional and embodied responses to and engagements with the apps the relational connections described between people and their apps or with other people or objects and what the apps enabled or motivated people to do. Findings point to three salient concerns about apps: (1) the need for efficiency (2) the importance and complexity of human relationships and maintaining these connections and (3) the complex relationships people have with their bodies. These concerns are expressed through themes that reflect how everyday efficiencies are produced through human–app entanglements apps as relational agents apps' ability to know and understand users and future app imaginaries. This project explores the affective and embodied dimensions of app use and thinks through the tensions between the extraordinary and mundane dimensions of contemporary techno-social landscapes, reflecting on how apps “matter” in everyday life. Our analysis surfaces the active role of the body and bodily performances in the production of app efficiencies and underlines the ways mobile apps are always situated in relation to other media and materialities.
Rethinking digital biopedagogies: How sociomaterial relations shape English secondary students' digital health practices
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 10-2022
DOI: 10.1016/J.SOCSCIMED.2022.115348
Abstract: It is widely recognised that while many young people in high-income countries are active users of digital health technologies, their engagement can be short term. In this article, we draw on feminist materialism theory to analyse findings from the two qualitative phases of a mixed-methods three phase study of English secondary students' digital health practices. Bringing together work on biopedagogies alongside more-than-human thinking, we analyse our participants' accounts of their intra-actions with human and nonhuman affordances and materialities. Our findings reveal how young people's capacity for navigating the digital health landscape and translating knowledge into health practice is highly contingent on the complex engagement of different actors in digital health assemblages, including more-than-digital relational connections. Our study found that key human actors - typically in face-to-face settings - were crucial in doing the affective work necessary to guide adolescents through the tensions and conflicts they experienced when dealing with competing knowledges and expectations. The research underlines the ways in which feminist materialism perspectives can supplement scholarship on biopedagogies, specifically contributing to the theorising on young people's learning and embodiment through digital practices.
The pedagogy of disgust: the ethical, moral and political implications of using disgust in public health campaigns
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 11-02-2014
‘The Great Debate About Cholesterol’: Medical Controversy and the News Media
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 12-1994
DOI: 10.1177/144078339403000307
Abstract: This note analyses features of the debate over the importance of controlling dietary cholesterol to prevent heart disease as it was reported in the Australian news media. It examines the position of the news media as sites for the struggle over meaning, at which a number of competing discourses are expressed and negotiated, and acknowledges the complexities of the tensions and often contradictory interests with which news media workers and organisations wrestle when constructing the news. It is concluded that while the controversial nature of the cholesterol debate was acknowledged in the news texts, the reproduction of dominant discourses concerning in idual responsibility for bodily control and lifestyle choices was achieved by glossing the debate as a medical controversy rather than as a serious challenge to health promotion orthodoxy.
Pharmacophore modeling and in silico toxicity assessment of potential anticancer agents from African medicinal plants
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 07-2016
DOI: 10.2147/DDDT.S108118
The commodification of patient opinion: the digital patient experience economy in the age of big data
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 07-2014
Abstract: As part of the digital health phenomenon, a plethora of interactive digital media platforms have been established in recent years to elicit lay people's experiences of illness and health care. The overt function of these platforms is to provide forums where patients and caregivers can share their experiences with others, benefit from the support and knowledge of other users and contribute to large aggregated data archives as part of developing better medical treatments and services and conducting medical research. However, what may not always be readily apparent to the users of these platforms are the growing commercial uses by many of the platforms' owners of the data they contribute. This article examines this phenomenon of what I term 'the digital patient experience economy'. Such aspects of this economy as prosumption (the combination of content consumption and production that is characteristic of the use of Web 2.0 technologies), the valorising of big data, the discourse and ethic of sharing and the commercialisation of affective labour are discussed. It is argued that via these online platforms patients' opinions and experiences may be expressed in more erse and accessible forums than ever before, but simultaneously they have become exploited in novel ways.
The presence and perceptibility of personal digital data: findings from a participant map drawing method
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 10-03-2023
‘What are you feeling right now?’ communities of maternal feeling on Mumsnet
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 02-2018
‘Better understanding about what's going on’: young Australians’ use of digital technologies for health and fitness
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 06-12-2020
Doctors on the medical profession.
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 09-1997
“‘Ninja’ levels of focus”: Therapeutic holding environments and the affective atmospheres of telepsychology during the COVID-19 pandemic
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 08-2021
From complacency to panic: AIDS and heterosexuals in the Australian press, July 1986 to June 1988
Publisher: Oxford University Press (OUP)
Date: 1992
DOI: 10.1093/HER/7.1.9
Abstract: AIDS is a disease which has received a great deal of attention from the popular media, which in turn has attracted the interests of those who analyse media. The health information conveyed to the general public by the popular press is a topic of special interest to health educators. This paper documents the Australian press' coverage of the AIDS threat to heterosexuals. The preliminary findings of a content analysis of all Australian articles mentioning AIDS published between June 1986 and July 1988 is reported. An overview of the issues gaining most attention in the press during that time is given and major narrative themes discussed. It is shown that the focus of the popular press' reporting of AIDS changed in that time from representing AIDS as a risk to only homosexuals and intravenous drug users, to generating panic-stricken articles suggesting that everyone was now threatened. The press generally lent their support to a major public health information c aign designed to warn heterosexuals of their risk of contracting AIDS (the 'Grim Reaper' c aign), although many articles exaggerated the threat and disseminated confusing information about the risk. Health educators need to have a good knowledge of press accounts of health issues, and be aware of the potential for support or conflicting information in the press both of health education c aigns and of the health issue itself.
Red hot frogs: identifying the Australian frogs most at risk of extinction
Publisher: CSIRO Publishing
Date: 20-08-2021
DOI: 10.1071/PC21019
Abstract: More than a third of the world’s hibian species are listed as Threatened or Extinct, with a recent assessment identifying 45 Australian frogs (18.4% of the currently recognised species) as ‘Threatened’ based on IUCN criteria. We applied structured expert elicitation to 26 frogs assessed as Critically Endangered and Endangered to estimate their probability of extinction by 2040. We also investigated whether participant experience (measured as a self-assigned categorical score, i.e. ‘expert’ or ‘non-expert’) influenced the estimates. Collation and analysis of participant opinion indicated that eight species are at high risk ( % chance) of becoming extinct by 2040, with the disease chytridiomycosis identified as the primary threat. A further five species are at moderate–high risk (30–50% chance), primarily due to climate change. Fourteen of the 26 frog species are endemic to Queensland, with many species restricted to small geographic ranges that are susceptible to stochastic events (e.g. a severe heatwave or a large bushfire). Experts were more likely to rate extinction probability higher for poorly known species (those with experts), while non-experts were more likely to rate extinction probability higher for better-known species. However, scores converged following discussion, indicating that there was greater consensus in the estimates of extinction probability. Increased resourcing and management intervention are urgently needed to avert future extinctions of Australia’s frogs. Key priorities include developing and supporting captive management and establishing or extending in-situ population refuges to alleviate the impacts of disease and climate change.
‘Doing the right thing’: The symbolic meanings and experiences of having an HIV antibody test
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 07-1995
DOI: 10.1016/0277-9536(94)00317-M
Abstract: Very few studies have been undertaken to explore in depth the reasons why in iduals seek HIV antibody testing. This paper discusses the socio-cultural meanings surrounding the HIV antibody test, using the findings from a qualitative study directed at understanding why 'low risk' in iduals make the decision to have an HIV test, their experiences of testing and their use of the result, especially in negotiating sexual relationships. It is concluded that the less obvious reasons for taking the test include pressure from parents or lovers, as a symbolic closure or commencement of a sexual relationship, the discourse of mutuality, the privileging of 'knowledge' and notions of responsibility and purity. Implications for AIDS education programs and policy are addressed.
Foreword: lively devices, lively data and lively leisure studies
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 08-08-2016
Precious, Pure, Uncivilised, Vulnerable: Infant Embodiment in Australian Popular Media
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 11-04-2013
DOI: 10.1111/CHSO.12004
Contextualising COVID-19: Sociocultural Perspectives on Contagion
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 2020
DOI: 10.2139/SSRN.3661226
Editorial: Towards sensory studies of digital health
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 2017
Mechanisms underlying host persistence following amphibian disease emergence determine appropriate management strategies
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 16-10-2020
DOI: 10.1111/ELE.13621
EXHIBITION REVIEW
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 09-1995
Towards critical digital health studies: Reflections on two decades of research in health and the way forward
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 20-10-2016
Abstract: In this article, I provide some reflections on critical digital health research in the context of Health’s 20th anniversary. I begin by outlining the various iterations of digital technologies that have occurred since the early 1990s – from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 to Web 3.0. I then review the research that has been published on the topic of digital health in this journal over the past two decades and make some suggestions for the types of directions and theoretical perspectives that further sociocultural and political research could tackle. My concluding comments identify four main areas for further research: (1) devices and software, (2) data materialisations, (3) data practices and (4) data mobilities.
‘Download to delicious’: Promissory themes and sociotechnical imaginaries in coverage of 3D printed food in online news sources
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 10-2017
‘Developing the “whole me”’: Citizenship, neo-liberalism and the contemporary health and physical education curriculum
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 12-1999
Reimagining digital health education: Reflections on the possibilities of the storyboarding method
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 11-04-2019
Abstract: To use the design method of storyboarding to challenge pre-service health education teachers to work together to think creatively and differently about digital health, to introduce pre-service teachers to the method as a pedagogical technique for use in their own classrooms, to experiment with our methods as a design sociology research project and to analyse the materials generated by the participants. Storyboarding, a design research method for engagement and research that invites participants to generate a narrative using images and words, was used. We conducted a 3-hour workshop using storyboarding as part of an Australian university programme for pre-service health education teachers. Following an introduction to the sociology of digital health and the possibilities of design methods, the pre-service teachers were formed into groups. Each group was provided with guidelines for imagining a new digital health device. They worked in their groups to generate a narrative in a storyboard format that described how this device would be used as part of everyday life. The groups then presented their storyboard to the class. The storyboards provided the research materials for analysing the sociotechnical imaginaries concerning digital health they presented. We found that the storyboarding method worked well as an engaging and creative exercise for the participants and to generate insights for us as researchers on the ways in which they conceptualised and imagined the role of digital health technologies. However, despite attempts to educate the pre-service teachers in critical thinking in the lead-up to the workshop that emphasised the sociocultural and political contexts of health behaviours, their storyboards largely presented visions of digital health technologies that relied on in idualistic behaviour change. After reflecting on the process, our conclusions provide some ideas for the way forward in using storyboarding as a transformative pedagogical and research tool.
Apps as artefacts: towards a critical perspective on mobile health and medical apps
Publisher: MDPI AG
Date: 29-10-2014
DOI: 10.3390/SOC4040606
Theorizing fear of crime: beyond the rational/irrational opposition
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 09-1999
How Women Use Digital Technologies for Health: Qualitative Interview and Focus Group Study
Publisher: JMIR Publications Inc.
Date: 25-01-2019
DOI: 10.2196/11481
Enacting intimacy and sociality at a distance in the COVID-19 crisis: the sociomaterialities of home-based communication technologies
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 03-10-2021
Abstract: Significant restrictions on movement outside the home due to the global COVID-19 pandemic have intensified the importance of everyday digital technologies for communicating remotely with intimate others. In this article, we draw on findings from a home-based video ethnography project in Sydney to identify the ways that digital devices and software served to support and enhance intimacy and sociality in this period of crisis and isolation. Digital communication technologies had an increased presence in people’s domestic lives during lockdown. For many people, video calling software had become especially important, allowing them to achieve greater closeness and connection with their friends and family in enacting both everyday routines and special events. These findings surface the digital and non-digital materialities of sociality and intimacy, and the capacities opened by people’s improvisation with the affordances of home-based communication technologies at a time of extended physical isolation.
Breaking Out of the Rut: The Use of Alternative Methodologies to Measure AIDS-Related Attitudes and Behaviour
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 11-1991
‘Precious cargo’: foetal subjects, risk and reproductive citizenship
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 09-2012
Developmental changes within the extended face processing network: A cross‐sectional functional magnetic resonance imaging study
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 10-11-2021
DOI: 10.1002/DNEU.22858
Abstract: In the field of face processing, the so‐called “core network” has been intensively researched. Its neural activity can be reliably detected in children and adults using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). However, the core network's counterpart, the so‐called “extended network,” has been less researched. In the present study, we compared children's and adults’ brain activity in the extended system, in particular in the amygdala, the insula, and the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG). Using fMRI, we compared the brain activation pattern between children aged 7–9 years and adults during an emotional face processing task. On the one hand, children showed increased activity in the extended face processing system in relation to adults, particularly in the left amygdala, the right insula, and the left IFG. On the other hand, lateralization indices revealed a “leftward bias” in children's IFG compared to adults. These results suggest that brain activity associated with face processing is characterized by a developmental decrease in activity. They further show that the development is associated with a rightward migration of face‐related IFG activation, possibly due to the competition for neural space between several developing brain functions (“developmental competition hypothesis”).
A more‐than‐human approach to bioethics: The example of digital health
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 13-08-2020
DOI: 10.1111/BIOE.12798
“How do you Measure up?” Assumptions About “Obesity” and Health-Related Behaviors and Beliefs in two Australian “Obesity” Prevention Campaigns
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 02-01-2014
Collaborating to Compete: Blood Profiling Atlas in Cancer (BloodPAC) Consortium
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 12-04-2017
DOI: 10.1002/CPT.666
Population stability in an unmanaged population of the green and golden bell frog in northern New South Wales, Australia
Publisher: CSIRO Publishing
Date: 13-07-2021
DOI: 10.1071/ZO20101
Abstract: Population monitoring is required to guide conservation programs. We conducted a capture–mark–recapture study of a population of the vulnerable green and golden bell frog (Litoria aurea) at the northern end of its range. Frogs were captured and marked over three breeding seasons (2015/16, 2016/17, 2017/18) in a large coastal lagoon. We aimed to: (1) produce annual estimates of population size to describe population trajectory, and (2) investigate monthly variation in abundance, capture probability, and temporary emigration to understand how these factors change at a finer temporal scale. Frog abundance varied across the three annual breeding seasons: 60–280 adult males, 120–190 adult females, and 90–420 subadults. We infer that the population is stable because adult abundance estimates were higher after 2015/16. Because our study s led only half the available breeding habitat, the overall population may number 350–850 adults. Our modelling revealed males but females were detected in the s le area in our monthly s les. Estimates of temporary emigration were high (males: 0.54 females: 0.79), suggesting behaviour that made frogs unavailable for capture between months. Our results suggest that monitoring at greater than annual intervals should be adequate to monitor the future trend of this population.
Human–nature connection: a multidisciplinary review
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 06-2017
Research-Creations for Speculating About Digitized Automation: Bringing Creative Writing Prompts and Vital Materialism into the Sociology of Futures
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 23-05-2022
DOI: 10.1177/10778004221097049
Abstract: In this article, we present ideas about developing innovative methods for the sociology of futures. Our approach brings together the literature on sociotechnical imaginaries and the sociology of futures with vital materialism theories and research-creation methods. We draw on our research-creation materials from a series of online workshops. The workshops involved the use of creative writing prompts with participants across a erse range of age groups and locations. The article ends with some reflections on the implications of our approach for researching the futures of emerging digital technologies and the methodological and theoretical development of the sociology of futures.
Quantifying the body: monitoring and measuring health in the age of mHealth technologies
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 12-2013
The end of AIDS?: AIDS reporting in the Australian press in the mid-1990s
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 03-1998
‘The Internet Both Reassures and Terrifies’: exploring the more-than-human worlds of health information using the story completion method
Publisher: BMJ
Date: 06-09-2021
DOI: 10.1136/MEDHUM-2019-011700
Abstract: Lay people are now encouraged to be active in seeking health and medical information and acting on it to engage in self-care and preventive health practices. Over the past three decades, digital media offering ready access to health information resources have rapidly expanded. In this article, I discuss findings from my study that sought to investigate health information practices by bringing together the social research method of story completion with more-than-human theory and postqualitative inquiry. Narratives of health, illness and embodiment are powerful ways to portray people’s experiences and identify the shared cultural norms and discourses that give meaning and context to these experiences. The research method of story completion is a novel approach to eliciting narratives that involve participants’ responses to hypothetical situations. Participants were asked to use an online questionnaire format to complete three stories involving characters faced with a different health problem. This approach sought to identify the human and non-human enabling resources with which the characters engaged as they tried to address and resolve their problem, with a particular interest in how both digital technologies and non-digital resources were used. This analysis highlighted the affective and relational dimensions of humans’ enactments of health, illness and embodiment. The stories surfaced the relations of sense-making, embodiment and care and how they are distributed between humans and non-humans. Agential capacities were closed off by elements such as too much information online creating confusion or anxiety, self-consciousness about the appearance of one’s body, feelings of embarrassment and shame, or not wanting to appear to be too weak or vulnerable. Capacities for change, wellness and recovery were opened by finding helpful information, making connections with others and finding therapeutic spaces and places.
Toward a More-Than-Human Analysis of Digital Health: Inspirations From Feminist New Materialism
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 09-04-2019
Abstract: New feminist materialism theories potentially offer a foundation for innovative ways to research health-related experiences from a more-than-human perspective. Thus far, however, few researchers have taken up this more-than-human and post-qualitative approach to investigate health topics. In this article, I outline some approaches I have developed. I begin with a brief overview of the central tenets of new feminist materialism scholarship and a discussion of some empirical studies where these perspectives have been employed to address health topics. I then list some key propositions, research questions, and things to think with from the feminist materialism literature that I have put to work as a basis for conducting empirical research and analyzing data. Then follows four ex les drawn from my research on digital health, providing instances of how qualitative researchers can take up this approach and what insights can be generated from entering into this kind of “research assemblage.”
Self-tracking cultures: Towards a sociology of personal informatics
Publisher: ACM
Date: 02-12-2014
Limits to medicine. Medical nemesis
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 04-2005
The Trajectory of Hemispheric Lateralization in the Core System of Face Processing: A Cross-Sectional Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Pilot Study
Publisher: Frontiers Media SA
Date: 02-10-2020
Emerging Perspectives in Health Communication
Publisher: Routledge
Date: 23-02-2009
Representing doctors: discourses and images in the Australian press
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 04-1998
DOI: 10.1016/S0277-9536(97)10013-2
Abstract: Reports of incidents and issues related to members of the medical profession and the practice of medicine often feature in the western news media. Such intense coverage has incited the interest of both medical sociologists and members of the profession themselves. Thus far, however, very few detailed studies addressing the tenor of news reporting on the medical profession have been published, particularly in relation to the Australian media. This article presents the findings of a systematic and comprehensive analysis of the representation of doctors and the medical practice over a period of 15 months (January 1994 to March 1995) in metropolitan Australian newspapers and major news magazines. The method of critical discourse analysis was employed, including both quantitative analysis and interpretive analysis of the language and visual imagery of the news texts. The study revealed that negative portrayals of doctors were countered by positive representations. While cases of medical negligence, sexual assault and avarice on the part of doctors were often reported, medical successes were also frequently covered. Doctors were overwhelmingly reported as the major authorities on medical matters and as active agents in interacting with patients and other groups such as government officials. It is concluded that while the nature of reporting would suggest that members of the medical profession may be constantly under the spotlight of media scrutiny, they enjoy a significant degree of cultural and social authority in the Australian press.
Doctors on the medical profession
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 09-1997
Splitting bodies/selves: women’s concepts of embodiment at the moment of birth
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 24-10-2012
DOI: 10.1111/J.1467-9566.2012.01532.X
Abstract: Little sociological research has focused specifically on the moment of birth. In this article we draw upon interview data with women who had very recently given birth for the first time to explore the ways in which they described both their own embodiment and that of their infants at this time. We use the term 'the body-being-born' to describe the liminality and fragmentation of the foetal/infant body as women experience it when giving birth. The study found that mode of birth was integral to the process of coming to terms with this body during and following birth. The women who gave birth vaginally without anaesthesia experienced an intense physicality as they felt their bodies painfully opening as the 'body-being-born' forced its way out. In contrast the women who had had a Caesarean section tended to experience both their own bodies and those of their infants as absent and alienated. Most of the women took some time to come to terms with the infant once it was born, conceptualising it as strange and unknown, but those who delivered by Caesarean section had to work even harder in coming to terms with the experience.
Risk and Everyday Life
Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
Date: 2003
Holding the line online: exploring wired relationships for people with disabilities
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 06-2004
Toward the Development of Critical Health Communication Praxis
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 1994
The Endangered Unborn
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan UK
Date: 2013
Death, Disposal and the Unborn
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan UK
Date: 2013
The Unborn within the Self: Women’s Experiences of Pregnancy
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan UK
Date: 2013
3D Printed Self Replicas: Personal Digital Data Made Solid
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 2015
DOI: 10.2139/SSRN.2645489
The Social Worlds of the Unborn
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan UK
Date: 2013
Beyond Techno-Utopia: Critical Approaches to Digital Health Technologies
Publisher: MDPI AG
Date: 08-12-2014
DOI: 10.3390/SOC4040706
Quantified sex: a critical analysis of sexual and reproductive self-tracking using apps
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 11-06-2014
DOI: 10.1080/13691058.2014.920528
Abstract: Digital health technologies are playing an increasingly important role in healthcare, health education and voluntary self-surveillance, self-quantification and self-care practices. This paper presents a critical analysis of one digital health device: computer apps used to self-track features of users' sexual and reproductive activities and functions. After a review of the content of such apps available in the Apple App Store and Google Play™ store, some of their sociocultural, ethical and political implications are discussed. These include the role played by these apps in participatory surveillance, their configuration of sexuality and reproduction, the valorising of the quantification of the body in the context of neoliberalism and self-responsibility, and issues concerning privacy, data security and the use of the data collected by these apps. It is suggested that such apps represent sexuality and reproduction in certain defined and limited ways that work to perpetuate normative stereotypes and assumptions about women and men as sexual and reproductive subjects. Furthermore there are significant ethical and privacy implications emerging from the use of these apps and the data they produce. The paper ends with suggestions concerning the 'queering' of such technologies in response to these issues.
Theorizing fear of crime: beyond the rational/irrational opposition
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 09-1999
DOI: 10.1111/J.1468-4446.1999.00507.X
Abstract: Much has been written about the 'social problem' of fear of crime in the criminological and sociological literature in recent years. We would argue that thus far in this literature, however, there has been too much emphasis on the question 'How rational is people's fear of crime?', a question that largely reduces the complexity of the phenomenon and positions a 'biased' lay response against an 'expert' objective judgment. In this article, we review different epistemological perspectives that can be offered to understand in greater depth the fear of crime phenomenon. We place particular emphasis on those hermeneutic perspectives that go beyond the models of the rationalist, in idualistic subject to exploring issues of symbolic representation, discourse and the micro - and macro-contexts in which fear of crime is experienced and given meaning. We also draw upon two case studies from our own empirical research into fear of crime, conducted with the intention of exploring the situated narratives, cultural representations and different levels of symbolic meaning that contribute to the dynamic constitution of fear.
‘It’s a terrible thing when your children are sick’: Motherhood and home healthcare work
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 09-2013
Psychoanalytic Sociology and the Medical Encounter: A Reply to Pilgrim
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 07-1998
Consumerism, commodity culture and health promotion
Publisher: Oxford University Press (OUP)
Date: 1994
Monsters in metal Cocoons: 'Road Rage' and cyborg bodies
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 03-1999
DOI: 10.1177/1357034X99005001005
Abstract: In this article, the sociocultural meanings and social relations and expectations that cohere around `road rage' and serve to invest it with its particular resonance in contemporary Western societies are examined. It is argued that the combination of car and driver in the driving experience produces a cyborg body, which influences the ways in which people experience, perceive and respond to driving and other cars/drivers. But in contemporary societies the expression of such `negative' emotions is problematic and complex. In this context, `road rage' is deemed to evidence loss of appropriate self-control and as `uncivilized'.
The affective intensities of datafied space
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 11-2016
The externality of the inside: Body images of pregnancy
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 03-2001
DOI: 10.1046/J.1440-1800.2001.00088.X
Abstract: This paper draws on literature, empirical data and a range of theoretical perspectives on the maternal body to examine understandings of the relationship between a pregnant woman and her foetus, with a particular focus on the body images used by women to represent this relationship. Psychoanalytic and nursing accounts of the relationship between mother and foetus have often described a symbiotic 'oneness' or unity during pregnancy. Such accounts, however, stress the temporary nature of this unity and identify a series of 'stages' of separation or 'polarisation' between mother and foetus during pregnancy. In contrast, many of the 25 women who participated in our interview study of new motherhood described a confusion of the boundary between self and foetus. For many women the experience of pregnancy and the relationship with the unborn baby was ambiguous and uncertain. Importantly, none of these women described her relationship with the foetus as a series of developmental stages, but rather saw it as fluctuating throughout pregnancy. These findings are more consistent with the work of feminist theorists who describe pregnancy as a dynamic and fluid merging of the inside and the outside of the body/self.
The more-than-human sensorium: sensory engagements with digital self-tracking technologies
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 04-05-2018
Recent trends in wind speed across Saudi Arabia, 1978–2013: a break in the stilling
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 29-01-2018
DOI: 10.1002/JOC.5423
Uneven Warming Likely Contributed to Declining Near‐Surface Wind Speeds in Northern China Between 1961 and 2016
Publisher: American Geophysical Union (AGU)
Date: 09-06-2021
DOI: 10.1029/2020JD033637
Abstract: A decline in mean near‐surface (10 m) wind speed has been widely reported for many land regions over recent decades, yet the underlying cause(s) remains uncertain. This study investigates changes in near‐surface wind speed over northern China from 1961 to 2016, and analyzes the associated physical mechanisms using station observations, reanalysis products and model simulations from the Community Atmosphere Model version 5.1 (CAM5). The homogenized near‐surface wind speed shows a significantly ( p 0.05) decline trend of −0.103 m s −1 decade −1 , which stabilized from the 1990s onwards. Similar negative trends are observed for all seasons, with the strongest trends occurring in the central and eastern parts of northern China. Fast warming has occurred at high‐latitudes (i.e., °N) in recent decades, which has weakened the annual and seasonal meridional air temperature gradient (−0.33°C to −0.12°C dec −1 , p 0.05, except autumn) between these regions (50°–60°N, 75°–135°E) and the northern China zone (35°–45°N, 75°–135°E). This caused a significant ( p 0.05) decrease in annual and seasonal pressure gradient (−0.43 to −0.20 hPa dec −1 ) between the two zones, which contributed to the slowdown of winds. CAM5 simulations demonstrate that spatially uneven air temperature increases and near‐surface wind speed decreases over northern China can be realistically reproduced using the so‐called “all forcing” simulation, while the “natural only forcing” simulation fails to realistically simulate the uneven warming patterns and declines in near‐surface wind speed over most of northern China, except for summer.
A new species of Philoria (Anura: Limnodynastidae) from the uplands of the Gondwana Rainforests World Heritage Area of eastern Australia
Publisher: Magnolia Press
Date: 25-02-2022
DOI: 10.11646/ZOOTAXA.5104.2.3
Abstract: The six species of mountain frogs (Philoria: Limnodynastidae: Anura) are endemic to south-eastern Australia. Five species occur in headwater systems in mountainous north-eastern New South Wales (NSW) and south-eastern Queensland (Qld), centred on the Gondwana Rainforests of Australia World Heritage Area. A previous molecular genetic analysis identified ergent genetic lineages in the central and western McPherson Ranges region of Qld and NSW, but s ling was inadequate to test the species status of these lineages. With more comprehensive geographic s ling and examination of the nuclear genome using SNP analysis, we show that an undescribed species, P. knowlesi sp. nov., occurs in the central and western McPherson Ranges (Levers Plateau and Mount Barney complex). The new species is not phylogenetically closely related to P. loveridgei in the nuclear data but is related to one of two ergent lineages within P. loveridgei in the mtDNA data. We postulate that the discordance between the nuclear and mtDNA outcomes is due to ancient introgression of the mtDNA genome from P. loveridgei into the new species. Male advertisement calls and multivariate morphological analyses do not reliably distinguish P. knowlesi sp. nov. from any of the Philoria species in northeast NSW and southeast Qld. The genetic comparisons also enable us to define further the distributions of P. loveridgei and P. kundagungan. S les from the Lamington Plateau, Springbrook Plateau, Wollumbin (Mt Warning National Park), and the Nightcap Range, are all P. loveridgei, and its distribution is now defined as the eastern McPherson Ranges and Tweed caldera. Philoria kundagungan is distributed from the Mistake Mountains in south-eastern Qld to the Tooloom Scrub on the Koreelah Range, southwest of Woodenbong, in NSW, with two subpopulations identified by SNP analysis. We therefore assessed the IUCN threat category of P. loveridgei and P. kundagungan and undertook new assessments for each of its two subpopulations and for the new taxon P. knowlesi sp. nov., using IUCN Red List criteria. Philoria loveridgei, P. kundagungan (entire range and northern subpopulation separately) and P. knowlesi sp. nov. each meet criteria for “Endangered” (EN B2(a)(b)[i, iii]). The southern subpopulation of P. kundagungan, in the Koreelah Range, meets criteria for “Critically Endangered” (CE B2(a)(b)[i, iii]). These taxa are all highly threatened due to the small number of known locations, the restricted nature of their breeding habitat, and direct and indirect threats from climate change, and the potential impact of the hibian disease chytridiomycosis. Feral pigs are an emerging threat, with significant impacts now observed in Philoria breeding habitat in the Mistake Mountains.
An Australian survey of women's use of pregnancy and parenting apps
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 08-2016
DOI: 10.1016/J.WOMBI.2016.01.008
Abstract: There are now many pregnancy and parenting apps available on the market for both pregnancy and parenting. To investigate how Australian women use pregnancy and parenting apps, their attitudes about the information provided and data privacy and security related to such use, and what features they look for in these apps. An online survey was completed by 410 women who were pregnant or had given birth to at least one child in the past three years, were aged between 18 and 45 and were competent in English. The use of pregnancy and parenting apps was common among the respondents. Almost three quarters of respondents had used at least one pregnancy app half reported using at least one parenting app. Respondents found the apps useful or helpful, particularly for providing information, monitoring foetal or child development and changes in their own bodies and providing reassurance. Yet many users were not actively assessing the validity of the content of these apps or considering issues concerning the security and privacy of the personal information about themselves and their children that these apps collect. Apps are becoming important as a source of information and self-monitoring and for providing reassurance for Australian pregnant women and mothers with young children. Midwives and other healthcare professionals providing care and support for pregnant women and women in the early years of motherhood need to take women's app use into account and recognise both the potential and limitations of these apps.
Handbook of Imaging in Biological Mechanics
Publisher: CRC Press
Date: 24-10-2014
DOI: 10.1201/B17566
‘A grim health future’: food risks in the Sydney press
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 06-2004
The Sociology of Risk and Gambling Reader
Publisher: Routledge
Date: 23-06-2006
The Emotional Self: A Sociocultural Exploration
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 11-1999
DOI: 10.2307/2655565
Constructing Fatherhood: Discourses and Experiences
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 11-1998
DOI: 10.2307/2654239
Attitudes to COVID-19 Vaccines Among Australians During the Delta Variant Wave: A Qualitative Interview Study
Publisher: Oxford University Press (OUP)
Date: 02-2023
Abstract: Since the outbreak of COVID-19 globally, a range of vaccines has been developed and delivered to reduce viral transmission and prevent COVID cases. This article reports findings from a qualitative research project involving telephone interviews with a erse group of 40 adult Australians about their experiences of the COVID crisis. Interviews were conducted in late 2021 when Australians were dealing with the Delta variant outbreak and following a major effort on the part of government authorities to improve COVID-19 vaccination supplies and take-up. Responses to a question about COVID vaccines revealed that attitudes to and acceptance of COVID vaccines among this group were overwhelmingly positive. All participants had received at least one vaccine dose and the majority expressed views in support of mass vaccination against COVID. People who were hesitant or cautious about accepting COVID vaccination referred to the vaccines’ novelty and potential side effects. While many people were aware of debates about vaccine safety in the news media, trust in science and medical advice about COVID vaccines was strong. Participants wanted to protect themselves and others by accepting the recommended doses. Participants’ locale was a major factor in shaping experiences and stances on vaccines. The setting of government targets and mandates for vaccination was a key motivating factor. The goal of ‘getting back to normal’ was expressed as another reason for accepting vaccination, particularly for those living in areas that had been badly affected by high COVID cases and prolonged lockdowns.
Choosing alternative therapy: an exploratory study of sociodemographic characteristics and motives of patients resident in Sydney
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 12-02-2010
DOI: 10.1111/J.1753-6405.1993.TB00122.X
Abstract: Disenchantment with allopathic medicine has coincided with an upsurge in recent years in Australians consulting alternative therapists about their health care needs. Two major government studies have provided valuable independent evidence about the sociodemographic characteristics of users of alternative therapies and about their attitudes to health and medical care. However, the focus of these inquiries was predominantly on the users of chiropractic and osteopathy, just two of the modalities which make up this erse field. To investigate, among other things, who consults alternative practitioners, how they come to choose a particular therapist, and whether, and on what basis, they have abandoned cosmopolitan medical care or use a combination of alternative and allopathic medicine, we conducted a cross-sectional survey of 289 patients of eight Sydney practices providing a range of alternative modalities. Findings indicate that far from being representative of the Australian community, the majority of our s le population came from a very select group, with a narrow range of socioeconomic backgrounds. The health risk behaviour of those surveyed was also significantly different from that exhibited by the population in general.
Medical and health stories on the Sydney Morning Herald's front page
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 12-02-2010
DOI: 10.1111/J.1753-6405.1995.TB00418.X
Abstract: Front-page coverage of medical and health stories in the Sydney Morning Herald over the one-year period, April 1992 to March 1993, was analysed. Features of the front-page stories, such as major topics, geographic location, visual imagery, use of news actors and news sources, the representation of medicine and health, the use of language in headlines, and dominant and recurring discourses were examined. Although front-page coverage was often contradictory and paradoxical, allowing space for alternative views on the value or otherwise of medical treatment and preventive health measures, it was predominantly conservative, giving greater voice to elite groups than less powerful groups, such as advocacy, activist and community groups, and to men rather than women. It tended to in idualise illness rather than place it in its broader socioeconomic and political contexts.
Imaging the Unborn
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan UK
Date: 2013
Contingencies of the Unborn
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan UK
Date: 2013
Self-Tracking Modes: Reflexive Self-Monitoring and Data Practices
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 2014
DOI: 10.2139/SSRN.2483549
Digitizing diagnosis: a review of mobile applications in the diagnostic process
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH
Date: 05-03-2015
DOI: 10.1515/DX-2014-0068
Abstract: An increasing number of smartphone and software applications (“apps”) have been developed and marketed to assist in the process of diagnosis, yet little attention has been paid to their content, claims, potential risks, limitations or benefits of their use. This study sought to describe and catalogue available diagnosis apps and explore their impact on the diagnostic process. We undertook a content analysis of the app descriptions and developers’ websites using the descriptions provided for 131 medical diagnosis smartphone apps that were available in the Google Play and Apple App stores. Each app was reviewed for its content and approach, and its claims to medical authority. Four major categories of apps were identified: 1. apps for diagnosing 2. diagnosis coding apps 3. books, journals, or other publications in app format 4. apps for medical education. Our analysis found that while these apps provide access to medical information previously widely not available to lay users and offered a convenient diagnostic tool for practitioners, many failed to describe the evidence base underpinning, or any other credential supporting, their design and use. These apps potentially shift how diagnosis operates, reconfiguring disease concepts and lay-professional relations. However they also raise the risk of conflict of interest and presenting inaccurate information. Further research is required into how these apps are used, the implications for medical practice and the impact on doctor-patient relationship.
How do data come to matter? Living and becoming with personal data
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 07-2018
Abstract: Humans have become increasingly datafied with the use of digital technologies that generate information with and about their bodies and everyday lives. The onto-epistemological dimensions of human–data assemblages and their relationship to bodies and selves have yet to be thoroughly theorised. In this essay, I draw on key perspectives espoused in feminist materialism, vital materialism and the anthropology of material culture to examine the ways in which these assemblages operate as part of knowing, perceiving and sensing human bodies. I draw particularly on scholarship that employs organic metaphors and concepts of vitality, growth, making, articulation, composition and decomposition. I show how these metaphors and concepts relate to and build on each other, and how they can be applied to think through humans’ encounters with their digital data. I argue that these theoretical perspectives work to highlight the material and embodied dimensions of human–data assemblages as they grow and are enacted, articulated and incorporated into everyday lives.
Back to complacency: AIDS in the Australian press, March—September 1990
Publisher: Oxford University Press (OUP)
Date: 1993
DOI: 10.1093/HER/8.1.5
Abstract: This paper reports the results of a quantitative and qualitative content analysis of all articles about AIDS published in the Australian metropolitan press during the 7 month period of March-September 1990. During the study period, almost 2800 articles mentioning AIDS were published, representing a drop in number of articles published compared with earlier years. Those issues receiving most press attention included people living with AIDS, AIDS and the law, AIDS policy and politics, the general spread of HIV/AIDS, AIDS education c aigns, drugs and medical treatment, and the HIV/AIDS threat posed to prison officers and health practitioners. The analysis demonstrates that the reporting of AIDS has changed over the course of the epidemic: topics which in the past commanded enormous press attention, such as AIDS as a 'gay plague' and the threat posed by the disease to heterosexuals, are no longer considered as newsworthy. Implications for AIDS health promotion activities are discussed.
Risk and governmentality
Publisher: Routledge
Date: 26-06-2023
Risk and reflexive modernization
Publisher: Routledge
Date: 26-06-2023
More-than-Human Wellbeing
Publisher: Queensland University of Technology
Date: 25-08-2023
DOI: 10.5204/MCJ.2976
Abstract: Introduction The concept of ‘wellbeing’ is typically thought of in human-centric ways, referring to the affective feelings and bodily sensations that people may have which inform their sense of health, safety, and connection. However, as our everyday lives, identities, relationships, and embodiments become digitised and datafied, ‘wellbeing’ has taken on new practices and meanings. The use of digital technologies such as mobile and wearable devices, social media platforms, and networks of information mediate our interactions with others, as well as the ways we conceptualise what it means to be human, including where the body begins and ends. In turn, digital health technologies and ‘wellness’ cultures such as those promoted on social media sites such as Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, TikTok, and Facebook have also shaped our understanding of ‘wellness’ and ‘wellbeing’, their parameters, and how they ought to be practiced and felt (Baker Lupton Digital Health Lupton et al.). For millennia, aspects of human bodies have been documented and materialised in a variety of ways to help people understand states of health and illness: including relationships to the environments in which they lived. Indigenous and other non-Western cosmologies have long emphasised the kinds of vibrancies and distributed agencies that are part of reciprocal more-than-human ‘manifestings’ of kinships, and have called for all people to adopt the role of stewards of the ecosystem (Bawaka Country et al. Hernández et al. Kimmerer Rots Todd Tynan). In Western cultures, ideas of the human body that reach back to ancient times adopt a perspective that viewed the continuous flows of forces (the four humours) in conjunction with the elements of air, wind, earth, and fire inside and outside the body as contributing to states of health or ill health. It was believed that good health was maintained by ensuring a balance between these factors, including acknowledgement of the role played by climactic, ecological, and celestial conditions (Hartnell Lagay). A more-than-human approach is beginning to be re-introduced into Western cultures through political activism and academic thinking about the harms to the planet caused by human actions, including global warming and climate crises, loss of habitats and ecological bio ersity, increased incidence of extreme weather events such as bushfires, floods, and cyclones, and emerging novel pathogens affecting the health not only of humans but of other living things (Lewis Lupton Covid Societies Lupton Internet of Animals Neimanis et al.). Contemporary Western more-than-human philosophers argue for the importance of acknowledging our kinship with other living and non-living things as a way of repositioning ourselves within the cosmos and working towards better health and wellbeing for the planet (Abram Braidotti Plumwood). As these approaches emphasise, health, wellbeing, and kinship are always imbricated within material-social assemblages of humans and non-digital things which are constantly changing, and thereby generating emergent rather than fixed capacities (Lupton "Human-Centric" Lupton et al.). In this article, we describe our More-than-Human Wellbeing exhibition. To date, new media, Internet, and communication studies have not devoted as much attention to more-than-human theory. It is this more-than-digital and more-than-human approach to health information and wellbeing that marks out our research program as particularly distinctive. Our research focusses on the many and varied digital and non-digital forms that information about health and bodies takes. We are interested in health data as they are made and form part of the objects and activities of people’s everyday lives and aim to expand the human-centric approach offered in digital health by positioning human health and embodiment as always imbricated within more-than-human ecosystems. We acknowledge that all environments (natural and human-built) are intertwined with humans, and that to a greater or lesser extent, all are configured with and through the often exploitative and extractive practices and ideologies of those living in late modern societies in which people are positioned as superior to and autonomous from other living things. Together with more-than-human scholarship, we take inspiration from work in which arts-based, multisensory, and museum curation methods are employed to draw attention to the intertwining of people and ecologies (Endt-Jones Howes). Our exhibition was planned as a research translation and engagement project, communicating several of our studies’ findings in arts-based media (Lupton "Embodying"). In what follows, we outline the concepts leading to the creation of our exhibits and describe how these pieces materialise and extend more-than-human concepts of wellbeing and care. Five of the exhibits we created for this exhibition are discussed. They all draw on our research findings across a range of studies, together with more-than-human theory and medical history (Lupton "More-Than-Human"). We describe how we used these pieces to materialise more-than-human concepts of health, wellbeing, and kinship in ways that we hoped would provoke critical thought, affective responses, and open capacities for action for contributing to both human and nonhuman flourishing. The background, thinking, and modes of making leading to the creation of ‘Cabinet of Human/Digital/Data Curiosities’, ‘Smartphone Fungi’, ‘Hand of Signs’, ‘Silken Anatomies’, and ‘Talking/Flowers’ are explained below. Bodily Curios Vaughan Wozniak-O’Connor and Deborah Lupton. Cabinet of Human/Digital/Data Curiosities. Reclaimed timber, found objects, resin 3D prints. 2023. Fig. 1: Cabinet of Human/Digital/Data Curiosities. Fig. 2: Detail from Cabinet of Human/Digital/Data Curiosities. The objects we have placed in Cabinet of Human/Digital/Data Curiosities (figs. 1 and 2) mix together such things from the past as prosthetic human eyeballs and teeth used in medicine and dentistry in earlier eras. This collection of found and manufactured objects, both old and new, draws on the concept of the ‘cabinet of curiosities’, also known as cabinets of wonder, which first became popular in the sixteenth century. Artefacts were assembled together for viewing in a room or a display case. The items were chosen for being notable in some way by the curator, including objects from natural history, antiquities, and religious relics, as well as works of art. These collections, purchased, curated, and assembled by members of the nobility or the wealthy as a marker of refinement, knowledge, or social status, were the precursor of museums (Endt-Jones). We see digital devices such as mobile phones as one of a multitude of ways that operate to document and preserve elements of human embodiment – indeed, as contemporary ‘cabinets of curiosities’. Our cabinet also refers to the tradition of medical museums, which display preserved human organs, body parts, and tissue in glass bottles for pedagogical purposes. Under this model of health, specimens of both ‘ideal’ health and also ‘ill’ health – abnormalities in the flesh – were documented as a means of categorising wellbeing. Museums such as these would often treat diseased and disabled bodies as oddities and artefacts of ‘curiosity’. In this work, we reimagine and wind back this way of thinking, through displaying and drawing attention and curiosity towards signs of the body and the everyday. We are showing that wellbeing is more than a process of categorisation, comparison, or measurement of ‘ideal’ or ‘abnormal’ it is in the traces we leave behind us when we return to the earth. Our information data are human remains, moving as endless constellations of the interior and exterior of the body (Lupton Data Selves). In this artwork, both reclaimed wood and 3D-printed resin were used as a synergy between the natural and synthetic. Taking our cue from the manner of display of these items in medical museums, we have added our own curios, including 3D-printed body organs sprouting fungi (fig. 2), as a way of demonstrating the entanglements between humans and the fungal kingdom. Interspersed among these relics of human bodies is a discarded mobile phone with its screen badly shattered. It is displayed as a more recent antiquated object for making images and collecting, storing, and displaying information and images about human bodies, which itself is subject to disastrous events despite its original high-tech veneer of glossy impermeability. Technologies are more-than-flesh as human-made simulacra of body parts. Our wellbeing is sensed and made sense of through bodies’ entanglements of human and nonhuman. These curios both materialise traces of our bodies and wellbeing and extend our bodies into the physical spaces we inhabit and through which we move. Reading the Traces and Signs Vaughan Wozniak-O’Connor and Deborah Lupton. Smartphone Fungi. Recycled European oak, 3D printed resin, CNC carved plywood. 2023 Vaughan Wozniak-O’Connor and Deborah Lupton. Hand of Signs. Laser-etched walnut and plywood. 2023. Fig. 3: Smartphone Fungi. / Fig. 4: Detail from Smartphone Fungi. Wellbeing is also a process of mark-making, realised through the reciprocal impressions we leave on each other and the world around us. In Smart Phone Fungi (figs. 3 and 4) we capture the idea of ‘recording’ that takes place between people, technologies, and the natural world. It was inspired by a huge tree which members of our team noticed on a bush walk in the Blue Mountains, near Sydney, Australia. Growing from this tree were fungi of similar size and shape to the smartphone that was used to capture the image. In our interpretation, a piece of reclaimed timber was used to represent the tree, itself marked by its human use, and fungal shapes replicating those on the tree were produced using computer numerical controlled (CNC) carving. The central timber post is covered with human and more-than-human traces, such as old tool marks, weather damage, and wood borer holes. Alongside these traces, the CNC-carved fungi forms add a conspicuously digital layer of human intervention. Fig. 5: Hand of Signs. In Hand of Signs (fig. 5), we extend this idea of both organic and digital data traces as something that can be ‘read’ or interpreted. Inspired by the practice of palmistry, this work re-interprets line reading, the historical wooden anatomical model, and human body scanning as ways of reading for signs of wellbeing in past and future. Palm readers interpret people’s character, health, longevity, and other aspects of their lives through the creases and traces of development, wear, and deteriorations in the skin of our hands (Chinn). Life leaves its traces on our palms. The piece also refers to the newer tradition of digitising human bodies (Lupton Quantified Self Lupton et al.), employing scanning and data visualising technologies, which uses spatial GPS data to deduce patterns of human activity. For both palmistry and in more contemporary monitoring technologies, one’s wellbeing can be deduced through the map: the lines of the palm and the errant traces collected by satellites and sensors. To reflect this relation between mapping and palmistry, our updated anatomical model references both the contours of 3D geospatial data and of the human palm. However, this piece looks to represent more layers of data beyond those captured by GPS data. By using reclaimed wood to construct this human hand model, we are again making an analogy between the marks of growth and life that timber displays and those that the human body bears and develops as people move through more-than-worlds throughout their lifespans. The piece also seeks to draw attention to the various ‘signs’ that have been used across centuries to interpret the current and future health and wellbeing of humans (once markings on or morphologies of the body, now often the digitised visualisations of the internal operations and physical movements of the body that are generated by digital health technologies), superimposing older and newer modes of corporeal knowledge. Layers of Mediation Megan Rose. Silken Anatomies. Digital print on satin and yoryu silk chiffon. 2023. Ash Watson. Talking/Flowers. Collage and digital inkjet on paper. 2023. Fig. 6: Detail from Silken Anatomies. The ways that we come to sense and understand wellbeing are also mediated through the reproductive interplay of natural and technological elements. Silken Anatomies (fig. 6) was inspired by anatomical prints from the Renaissance showing details of the interiors of human bodies and organs together with living things and objects from the natural world. These webs of interconnectivity were thought to be key to wellbeing and health. Produced at scale through metal engraving and woodblock printing, these natural history and compendia took on major importance as part of these educational resources (Kemp Swan). In an effort to extend the reach of artefacts beyond their tangible presence, libraries globally have sought to create open access digital scans of historic medical and botanical illustrations. The images reconfigured in Silken Anatomies were downloaded from the Wellcome Trust’s online archive and have been reimagined through digital enhancement and sublimation dye techniques. Referencing shrouds, the yoryu silk panels enfold exhibition visitors, who were able to touch and pass through the silks, causing them to billow in response to human movement. We bring together an animal-made material (crafted by silkworms) with more-than-human images featuring both humans and other living creatures. The vibrancies of these beautifully engraved and coloured anatomical images are given a new life and a new feel, both affectively and sensuously, through this piece. We can both see and touch these more-than-human illustrations that speak to us of the early modern natural science visualisations that underpin contemporary digital images of the human body and the more-than-human world. The vibrancies of these beautifully engraved and coloured anatomical plates are given a new life and a new feel, both affectively and sensuously. The digital is returned to the tangible. Fig. 7: Detail from Talking/Flowers. Even in increasingly digitised healthcare environments, paper and other printed materials remain central documents in the landscape of health and wellbeing. Zines are small-scale, DIY, and typically handcrafted publications, which are often made to express creators’ thoughts and feelings about health and wellbeing (Lupton "Health Zines" Watson and Bennett). Talking/Flowers (fig. 7), a zine of visual and textual work, explores the materialities of health information and healthcare encounters by creatively layering a erse range of materials: clippings from MRI scans, digitally warped and recoloured images from medical infographics, and found poetry made from research publications. In this way, the zine remixes and reconstitutes key documents of authority in health institutions which continue to take primacy as evidence. While vital in the pipeline of diagnosis and treatment, such documents can become black boxes of meaning, and serve to distance health professionals from consumers and consumers from agentic understandings of their own health. These evidentiary materials are brought together here with other imagery, textures, and recollections of personal experience the pages also feature leaves, flowers, fungi, and oceanic tones. Oceans, pools, rivers, lakes, and other coastal forms or waterways offer all-consuming sensory spaces in which people can find calm, balance, buoyancy, and connection with the wider world. Aqua tides, purple eddies, and misshapen pearls flow through the pages as the golden thread of the zine’s aesthetic theme. Also featured are three original poems. The first and third poems, ‘talking to a doctor’ and ‘talking to other people’, explore moments of relational vulnerability. The second poem, ‘untitled’, is a found poem made from the conclusions of sociologist Talcott Parsons’s 1975 article on the sick role reconsidered. In each of these poems, information and communication jar the encounters and more-than-human metaphors hold space for complex feelings. The cover similarly merges imagery from botanical and historical medical illustrations with a silver shell, evoking the morphological dimensions that connect the more-than-human. Exhibition visitors were able to turn the pages of the original copy of the zine, and were invited to take a printed copy away with them. Conclusion More-than-Human Wellbeing is an exhibition which aims to expand the horizons of how we understand wellbeing and our entanglements with the world. Our exhibition was designed to draw on our research into the more-than-human dimensions of health and wellbeing in the context of an increasingly digitised and datafied world. We wanted to attune visitors to the relational connections and multisensory ways of knowing that develop with and through people’s encounters and entanglements with creatures, things, and spaces. We sought to demonstrate that in this digital age, in which digital devices and software are often considered the most accurate and insightful ways to monitor and measure health and wellbeing, multisensory and affective engagements with elements of the natural environment remain crucial to understanding our bodies and health. Through engagements with our artworks, we hoped that new capacities for visitors’ learning and thinking about the relational and distributed dimensions of more-than-human wellbeing would be opened. While traditionally thought of as human-centered, we explore human health and wellbeing as interconnected with both the natural and technological. We used materials from the natural world – timber, paper materials, and silk fabric – in our artworks to capture both the multigenerational traces and entanglements between humans and plant matter. Recent works of natural and cultural history have drawn attention to the mysterious and important worlds of the fungi kingdom and its role in supporting and living symbiotically with other life on earth, including humans as well as plants (Sheldrake Tsing). We also made sure to acknowledge this third kingdom of living things in our artworks. We combined these images and materials from nature with digitised modes of printing and fabrication to highlight the intersections of the digital with the non-digital in representations and sensory feelings of health and wellbeing. We disrupt and make strange signs of traditional human-centric medicine through reconfigurations, bricolage, and re-imaginations of more-than-human wellbeing. As humans we are interconnected with the natural world, and the signs of these meetings can be traced and read. Through our artistic creations, we hope to re-orient people towards this more open way of thinking about wellbeing. Working with arts practices and creative data visualisations, both digital and analogue, we bring to the fore the role that more-than-human agents play in mediating and making these convivial more-than-digital connections. Acknowledgments This research was funded by the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society (CE200100005) and a Faculty of Arts, Design & Architecture collaboration grant. UNSW Library provided financial and curatorial support for the mounting of the exhibition. References Abram, David. "Wild Ethics and Participatory Science: Thinking between the Body and the Breathing Earth." Planet. Volume 1. Kinship: Belonging in a World of Relations. Eds. Gavin van Horn et al. Center for Humans & Nature Press, 2021. 50-62. 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Digital Health: Critical and Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives. Routledge, 2017. ———. "Embodying Social Science Research – the Exhibition as a Form of Multi-Sensory Research Communication." LSE Impact of the Social Sciences, 2023. blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2023/07/12/embodying-social-science-research-the-exhibition-as-a-form-of-multi-sensory-research-communication/ . ———. "From Human-Centric Digital Health to Digital One Health: Crucial New Directions for Mutual Flourishing." Digital Health 8 (2022). DOI: 10.1177/20552076221129103. ———. "Health Zines: Hand-Made and Heart-Felt." Routledge Handbook of Health and Media. Eds. Lester Friedman and Therese Jones. Routledge, 2022. 65-76. ———. The Internet of Animals: Human-Animals Relationships in the Digital Age. Polity Press, 2023. ———. "The More-than-Human Wellbeing Exhibition." dlupton.com/ . ———. The Quantified Self: A Sociology of Self-Tracking. Polity Press, 2016. Lupton, Deborah, et al. "Digitized and Datafied Embodiment: A More-than-Human Approach." Palgrave Handbook of Critical Posthumanism. Eds. Stefan Herbrechter et al. Springer International Publishing, 2022. 1-23. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-42681-1_65-1. Neimanis, Astrida, et al. "Four Problems, Four Directions for Environmental Humanities: Toward Critical Posthumanities for the Anthropocene." Ethics & the Environment 20.1 (2015): 67-97. Plumwood, Val. Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. Routledge, 2002. Rots, Aike P. Shinto, Nature and Ideology in Contemporary Japan: Making Sacred Forests. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017. Sheldrake, Merlin. Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures. Random House, 2020. Swan, Claudia. "Illustrated Natural History." Prints and the Pursuit of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe. Ed. Susan Dackerman. Harvard Art Museums, 2011. 186-191. Todd, Zoe. "An Indigenous Feminist's Take on the Ontological Turn: ‘Ontology’ Is Just Another Word for Colonialism." Journal of Historical Sociology 29.1 (2016): 4-22. Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton UP, 2015. Tynan, Lauren. "What Is Relationality? Indigenous Knowledges, Practices and Responsibilities with Kin." cultural geographies 28.4 (2021): 597-610. DOI: 10.1177/14744740211029287. Watson, Ash, and Andy Bennett. "The Felt Value of Reading Zines." American Journal of Cultural Sociology 9.2 (2021): 115-149. DOi: 10.1057/s41290-020-00108-9.
Risk misinformation and denial
Publisher: Routledge
Date: 26-06-2023
Limited impact of chytridiomycosis on juvenile frogs in a recovered species
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date: 06-2023
DOI: 10.1007/S00442-023-05406-W
Abstract: The hibian chytrid fungus Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis ( Bd ) has caused catastrophic frog declines on several continents, but disease outcome is mediated by a number of factors. Host life stage is an important consideration and many studies have highlighted the vulnerability of recently metamorphosed or juvenile frogs compared to adults. The majority of these studies have taken place in a laboratory setting, and there is a general paucity of longitudinal field studies investigating the influence of life stage on disease outcome. In this study, we assessed the effect of endemic Bd on juvenile Mixophyes fleayi (Fleay’s barred frog) in subtropical eastern Australian rainforest. Using photographic mark-recapture, we made 386 captures of 116 in iduals and investigated the effect of Bd infection intensity on the apparent mortality rates of frogs using a multievent model correcting for infection state misclassification. We found that neither Bd infection status nor infection intensity predicted mortality in juvenile frogs, counter to the expectation that early life stages are more vulnerable to disease, despite average high infection prevalence (0.35, 95% HDPI [0.14, 0.52]). Additionally, we found that observed infection prevalence and intensity were somewhat lower for juveniles than adults. Our results indicate that in this Bd -recovered species, the realized impacts of chytridiomycosis on juveniles were apparently low, likely resulting in high recruitment contributing to population stability. We highlight the importance of investigating factors relating to disease outcome in a field setting and make recommendations for future studies.
‘All at the tap of a button’: Mapping the food app landscape
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 17-11-2021
DOI: 10.1177/13675494211055732
Abstract: Mobile applications (commonly known as ‘apps’) are highly popular forms of software, with hundreds of billions of downloads globally each year. The ways in which the affordances of apps are portrayed on the app store platforms are crucial in sparking consumers’ initial interest. This article presents findings from the ‘Mapping the Food App Landscape’ study. The following two sources of online material were used in this study: (1) descriptions of food-related apps available in the Google Play store and (2) the lists of the top-most installed free Android apps presented in the App Annie app analytics platform for Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States. The analytical approach is distinctive in bringing together the key feminist new materialism concepts of affective forces, relational connections and agential capacities with that of the promissory narrative. The study’s findings show that inapp publishers’ efforts to entice users, the Google Play app descriptions presented food apps as solutions to or escapes from the stresses and difficulties of everyday life. These app descriptions promised to generate excitement, fun and pleasure (games apps) configure and support convenient food supply and preparation arrangements (food ordering and delivery, meal planning and recipe apps) offer reassurance and better control over the body and encourage greater embodied self-awareness, health and wellbeing (food-tracking and nutrition apps) and contribute to creative and novel experiments in cooking (recipe apps). These findings map the landscape of food apps and the sociocultural contexts in which they are being created, published and adopted.
Presente y futuro de la sociología digital: Entrevista a Deborah Lupton
Publisher: Universidad Complutense de Madrid (UCM)
Date: 18-04-2023
DOI: 10.5209/TEKN.87181
Abstract: En este artículo aportamos una reflexión sobre la sociología digital diez años después de su desarrollo, incluyendo una entrevista a Deborah Lupton, una de las investigadoras más destacadas del ámbito de la investigación social digital. En esta entrevista, Lupton reflexiona sobre la sociología digital desde una mirada actual, consciente de los cambios que ha experimentado esta disciplina desde la publicación de su obra Digital sociology (2014). Nos habla de las nuevas plataformas, programas y dispositivos digitales que se han popularizado en los últimos años, de los efectos de las tecnologías digitales en la investigación social y comparte su visión sobre el futuro de la investigación social digital, abogando por la experimentación con los métodos creativos y las herramientas digitales.
Risk and subjectivity
Publisher: Routledge
Date: 26-06-2023
Immunological aspects of chytridiomycosis
Publisher: MDPI AG
Date: 19-10-2020
DOI: 10.3390/JOF6040234
Abstract: Amphibians are currently the most threatened vertebrate class, with the disease chytridiomycosis being a major contributor to their global declines. Chytridiomycosis is a frequently fatal skin disease caused by the fungal pathogens Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (Bd) and Batrachochytrium salamandrivorans (Bsal). The severity and extent of the impact of the infection caused by these pathogens across modern Amphibia are unprecedented in the history of vertebrate infectious diseases. The immune system of hibians is thought to be largely similar to that of other jawed vertebrates, such as mammals. However, hibian hosts are both ectothermic and water-dependent, which are characteristics favouring fungal proliferation. Although hibians possess robust constitutive host defences, Bd/Bsal replicate within host cells once these defences have been breached. Intracellular fungal localisation may contribute to evasion of the induced innate immune response. Increasing evidence suggests that once the innate defences are surpassed, fungal virulence factors suppress the targeted adaptive immune responses whilst promoting an ineffectual inflammatory cascade, resulting in immunopathology and systemic metabolic disruption. Thus, although infections are contained within the integument, crucial homeostatic processes become compromised, leading to mortality. In this paper, we present an integrated synthesis of hibian post-metamorphic immunological responses and the corresponding outcomes of infection with Bd, focusing on recent developments within the field and highlighting future directions.
Fabricated Data Bodies: Reflections on 3D Printed Digital Body Objects in Medical and Health Domains
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 2014
DOI: 10.2139/SSRN.2524270
‘Next generation PE’? A sociomaterial approach to digitised health and physical education
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 26-02-2022
‘It’s made me a lot more aware’: a new materialist analysis of health self-tracking
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 26-04-2019
Abstract: With the advent of apps, other software and wearable devices designed to enable people to easily monitor and measure details about their bodies, much attention has been paid to the phenomenon of health self-tracking. In this article, findings from a study involving interviews with 40 Australian self-trackers are discussed and analysed from a feminist new materialist perspective, focusing on relational dimensions, affective forces and agential capacities. Analysis of their accounts identified several major agential capacities generated by self-tracking health and illness, including achieving knowledge, awareness and problem-solving taking control and feeling better. Affective forces were strongly evident in the ways the participants talked about their practices and rationales for health self-tracking, including the pleasure and satisfaction they experienced, as well as the demoralising or burdensome elements they described. Relational dimensions included interpersonal and biographical contexts as well as enactments of embodied and technological sensing and recording.
Digital health now and in the future: Findings from a participatory design stakeholder workshop
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 2017
Introduction: risk and sociocultural theory
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Date: 09-12-1999
‘Panic bodies’: discourses on risk and HIV antibody testing
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 1995
‘I’d like to think you could trust the government, but I don’t really think we can’: Australian women’s attitudes to and experiences of My Health Record
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 2019
Abstract: The Australian government’s Australian Digital Health Agency is working towards its goal of enrolling every Australian in My Health Record, its national electronic health record system. This article reports findings from a qualitative project involving interviews and focus groups with Australian women about their use of digital health across the range of technologies available to them, including their attitudes to and experiences of My Health Record. A feminist new materialism perspective informed the project, working to surface the affordances, affective forces and relational connections that contributed to the opening up or closing off potential agential capacities when people come together with digitised systems such as My Health Record. These findings demonstrate that people’s personal experiences and feelings, the actions of others such as the agencies responsible for system implementation and function, their healthcare providers and broader social, cultural, technological and political factors are important in shaping their knowledge, interest in and acceptance of an electronic health record system. Even among this group of participants, who were experienced and active in finding and engaging with health information online, uncertainty and a lack of awareness of and interest in My Health Record were evident among many. Affordances such as technical difficulties were major barriers to enrolling and using the system successfully. No participants had yet found any benefit or use for it. Affective forces such as lack of trust and faith in the Australian government’s general technological expertise and concerns about data privacy and security were also key in many participants’ accounts.
A field guide to cultivating computational biology
Publisher: Public Library of Science (PLoS)
Date: 07-10-2021
DOI: 10.1371/JOURNAL.PBIO.3001419
Abstract: Evolving in sync with the computation revolution over the past 30 years, computational biology has emerged as a mature scientific field. While the field has made major contributions toward improving scientific knowledge and human health, in idual computational biology practitioners at various institutions often languish in career development. As optimistic biologists passionate about the future of our field, we propose solutions for both eager and reluctant in idual scientists, institutions, publishers, funding agencies, and educators to fully embrace computational biology. We believe that in order to pave the way for the next generation of discoveries, we need to improve recognition for computational biologists and better align pathways of career success with pathways of scientific progress. With 10 outlined steps, we call on all adjacent fields to move away from the traditional in idual, single-discipline investigator research model and embrace multidisciplinary, data-driven, team science.
Risk and the ontology of pregnant embodiment
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Date: 09-12-1999
Health information in creative translation: establishing a collaborative project of research and exhibition making
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 02-01-2023
‘It's like having a physician in your pocket!’ A critical analysis of self-diagnosis smartphone apps
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 05-2015
DOI: 10.1016/J.SOCSCIMED.2015.04.004
Abstract: More than 100,000 mobile phone software applications ('apps') have been designed for the dissemination of health and medical information and healthcare and public health initiatives. This article presents a critical analysis of self-diagnosis smartphone apps directed at lay people that were available on the Apple App Store and Google Play in mid-April 2014. The objective of the analysis is to contribute to the sociology of diagnosis and to critical digital health studies by investigating the phenomenon of digitised diagnosis via apps. We adopted a perspective that views apps as sociocultural artefacts. Our analysis of self-diagnosis apps suggests that they inhabit a contested and ambiguous site of meaning and practice. We found that app developers combined claims to medical expertise in conjunction with appeals to algorithmic authority to promote their apps to potential users. While the developers also used appeals to patient engagement as part of their promotional efforts, these were undermined by routine disclaimers that users should seek medical advice to effect a diagnosis. More research is required to investigate how lay people are negotiating the use of these apps, the implications for privacy of their personal data and the possible effects on the doctor-patient relationship and medical authority in relation to diagnosis.
Border Crossings: Narratives of Movement, ‘Home’ and Risk
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 02-2001
DOI: 10.5153/SRO.547
Abstract: Despite the extensive sociological literature commenting on the ‘risk society’, surprisingly little empirical research has explored the ways in which notions, narratives and knowledges concerning risks are developed, understood and embedded in personal risk biographies. In particular, this is true of some of the most vulnerable people in the risk society: those who have migrated for reasons of personal, religious, economic, material or ideological persecution. This article addresses risk perceptions of immigrants to Australia, using data from a larger project on Australians’ perceptions and negotiation of risk. The emphasis of the research is on dimensions of risk biography that highlight matters of multiple identity and subjectivities. Drawing on three such risk biographies, we pose and begin to answer a number of specific questions: How have people come to construct their knowledges on risks? Which risks do people find most threatening or important? Whom do people see as causing or having responsibility over risk? How do people posit solutions for dealing with risk? In doing so we critique Beck's notion of the ‘cataclysmic’ and ‘democratised’ notion of risk within ‘risk modernity’.
Temporal patterns in ecosystem services research: A review and three recommendations
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date: 27-11-2019
Risk and emotion: towards an alternative theoretical perspective
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 12-2013
Psychoanalytic sociology and the medical encounter: Parsons and beyond
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 11-1997
The Quantified Pandemic
Publisher: Routledge
Date: 09-05-2022
How Women Use Digital Technologies for Health: Qualitative Interview and Focus Group Study (Preprint)
Publisher: JMIR Publications Inc.
Date: 04-07-2018
Abstract: range of digital technologies are available to lay people to find, share, and generate health-related information. Few studies have directed attention specifically to how women are using these technologies from the erse array available to them. Even fewer have focused on Australian women’s use of digital health. he Australian Women and Digital Health Project aimed to investigate which types of digital technologies women used regularly for health-related purposes and which they found most helpful and useful. Qualitative methods—semistructured interviews and focus groups—were employed to shed light on the situated complexities of the participants’ enactments of digital health technologies. The project adopted a feminist new materialism theoretical perspective, focusing on the affordances, relational connections, and affective forces that came together to open up or close off the agential capacities generated with and through these enactments. he project comprised two separate studies including a total of 66 women. In study 1, 36 women living in the city of Canberra took part in face-to-face interviews and focus groups, while study 2 involved telephone interviews with 30 women from other areas of Australia. he affordances of search engines to locate health information and websites and social media platforms for providing information and peer support were highly used and valued. Affective forces such as the desire for trust, motivation, empowerment, reassurance, control, care, and connection emerged in the participants’ accounts. Agential capacities generated with and through digital health technologies included the capacity to seek and generate information and create a better sense of knowledge and expertise about bodies, illness, and health care, including the women’s own bodies and health, that of their families and friends, and that of their often anonymous online social networks. The participants referred time and again to appreciating the feelings of agency and control that using digital health technologies afforded them. When the technologies failed to work as expected, these agential capacities were not realized. Women responded with feelings of frustration, disappointment, and annoyance, leading them to become disenchanted with the possibilities of the digital technologies they had tried. he findings demonstrate the nuanced and complex ways in which the participants were engaging with and contributing to online sources of information and using these sources together with face-to-face encounters with doctors and other health care professionals and friends and family members. They highlight the lay forms of expertise that the women had developed in finding, assessing, and creating health knowledges. The study also emphasized the key role that many women play in providing advice and health care for family members not only as digitally engaged patients but also as digitally engaged carers.
Do immune system changes at metamorphosis predict vulnerability to chytridiomycosis? An update
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 11-2022
DOI: 10.1016/J.DCI.2022.104510
Abstract: Amphibians are among the vertebrate groups suffering great losses of bio ersity due to a variety of causes including diseases, such as chytridiomycosis (caused by the fungal pathogens Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis and B. salamandrivorans). The hibian metamorphic period has been identified as being particularly vulnerable to chytridiomycosis, with dramatic physiological and immunological reorganisation likely contributing to this vulnerability. Here, we overview the processes behind these changes at metamorphosis and then perform a systematic literature review to capture the breadth of empirical research performed over the last two decades on the metamorphic immune response. We found that few studies focused specifically on the immune response during the peri-metamorphic stages of hibian development and fewer still on the implications of their findings with respect to chytridiomycosis. We recommend future studies consider components of the immune system that are currently under-represented in the literature on hibian metamorphosis, particularly pathogen recognition pathways. Although logistically challenging, we suggest varying the timing of exposure to Bd across metamorphosis to examine the relative importance of pathogen evasion, suppression or dysregulation of the immune system. We also suggest elucidating the underlying mechanisms of the increased susceptibility to chytridiomycosis at metamorphosis and the associated implications for population persistence. For species that overlap a distribution where Bd/Bsal are now endemic, we recommend a greater focus on management strategies that consider the important peri-metamorphic period.
An invasive pathogen drives directional niche contractions in amphibians
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date: 07-08-2023
Understanding the Human Machine [Commentary]
Publisher: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
Date: 2013
Epidemiology as a sociocultural practice
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 1997
The digitally engaged patient: Self-monitoring and self-care in the digital health era
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date: 19-06-2013
DOI: 10.1057/STH.2013.10
Molecular Modeling of Potential Anticancer Agents from African Medicinal Plants
Publisher: American Chemical Society (ACS)
Date: 25-08-2014
DOI: 10.1021/CI5003697
Abstract: Naturally occurring anticancer compounds represent about half of the chemotherapeutic drugs which have been put in the market against cancer until date. Computer-based or in silico virtual screening methods are often used in lead/hit discovery protocols. In this study, the "drug-likeness" of ~400 compounds from African medicinal plants that have shown in vitro and/or in vivo anticancer, cytotoxic, and antiproliferative activities has been explored. To verify potential binding to anticancer drug targets, the interactions between the compounds and 14 selected targets have been analyzed by in silico modeling. Docking and binding affinity calculations were carried out, in comparison with known anticancer agents comprising ~1,500 published naturally occurring plant-based compounds from around the world. The results reveal that African medicinal plants could represent a good starting point for the discovery of anticancer drugs. The small data set generated (named AfroCancer) has been made available for research groups working on virtual screening.
Recovered frog populations coexist with endemic Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis despite load‐dependent mortality
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 27-10-2023
DOI: 10.1002/EAP.2724
Abstract: Novel infectious diseases, particularly those caused by fungal pathogens, pose considerable risks to global bio ersity. The hibian chytrid fungus ( Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis , Bd ) has demonstrated the scale of the threat, having caused the greatest recorded loss of vertebrate bio ersity attributable to a pathogen. Despite catastrophic declines on several continents, many affected species have experienced population recoveries after epidemics. However, the potential ongoing threat of endemic Bd in these recovered or recovering populations is still poorly understood. We investigated the threat of endemic Bd to frog populations that recovered after initial precipitous declines, focusing on the endangered rainforest frog Mixophyes fleayi . We conducted extensive field surveys over 4 years at three independent sites in eastern Australia. First, we compared Bd infection prevalence and infection intensities within frog communities to reveal species‐specific infection patterns. Then, we analyzed mark‐recapture data of M. fleayi to estimate the impact of Bd infection intensity on apparent mortality rates and Bd infection dynamics. We found that M. fleayi had lower infection intensities than sympatric frogs across the three sites, and cleared infections at higher rates than they gained infections throughout the study period. By incorporating time‐varying in idual infection intensities, we show that healthy M. fleayi populations persist despite increased apparent mortality associated with infrequent high Bd loads. Infection dynamics were influenced by environmental conditions, with Bd prevalence, infection intensity, and rates of gaining infection associated with lower temperatures and increased rainfall. However, mortality remained constant year‐round despite these fluctuations in Bd infections, suggesting major mortality events did not occur over the study period. Together, our results demonstrate that while Bd is still a potential threat to recovered populations of M. fleayi , high rates of clearing infections and generally low average infection loads likely minimize mortality caused by Bd . Our results are consistent with pathogen resistance contributing to the coexistence of M. fleayi with endemic Bd . We emphasize the importance of incorporating infection intensity into disease models rather than infection status alone. Similar population and infection dynamics likely exist within other recovered hibian‐ Bd systems around the globe, promising longer‐term persistence in the face of endemic chytridiomycosis.
Pandemic fitness assemblages: The sociomaterialities and affective dimensions of exercising at home during the COVID-19 crisis
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 28-09-2021
DOI: 10.1177/13548565211042460
Abstract: The implementation of physical distancing measures and lockdowns across the globe to control the spread of COVID-19 has led to the home becoming a focal point of exercise and fitness activities for many people. A plethora of digital tools were hastily assembled to help people workout at home or in spaces close to home: including apps with workout suggestions, online videos and livestreamed fitness classes. In this article, we draw on our empirical material collected through semi-structured interviews and virtual ethnographic home tours with Australian adults to explore the ‘pandemic fitness assemblages’ generated with and through their improvised pandemic fitness practices inside and outside their homes. These materials illustrate how bodies, digital and non-digital technologies, and place and space came together and help to surface the affects, sensations and embodiments that emerged. We describe how people’s re-imagined fitness practices contributed to daily routines, transformed the atmospheres of the home and yielded affective experiences of escape. To do so, we think with sociospatial and feminist materialism theoretical frameworks that emphasise the generative relationships emerging between human and more-than-human forces and entities. Our analysis further illuminates the situatedness and relationality of these heterogeneous forces and considers how they come to matter within the broader sociomaterial context of COVID-19.
‘It Just Gives Me a Bit of Peace of Mind’: Australian Women’s Use of Digital Media for Pregnancy and Early Motherhood
Publisher: MDPI AG
Date: 15-09-2017
DOI: 10.3390/SOC7030025
Digital companion species and eating data: Implications for theorising digital data-human assemblages
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 06-01-2016
Abstract: This commentary is an attempt to begin to identify and think through some of the ways in which sociocultural theory may contribute to understandings of the relationship between humans and digital data. I develop an argument that rests largely on the work of two scholars in the field of science and technology studies: Donna Haraway and Annemarie Mol. Both authors emphasised materiality and multiple ontologies in their writing. I argue that these concepts have much to offer critical data studies. I employ the tropes of companion species, drawn from Haraway, and eating data, from Mol, and demonstrate how these may be employed to theorise digital data–human assemblages.
Brainhack: Developing a culture of open, inclusive, community-driven neuroscience
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 06-2021
‘Not the Real Me’: Social Imaginaries of Personal Data Profiling
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 06-08-2021
Abstract: In this article, I present findings from my Data Personas study, in which I invited Australian adults to respond to the stimulus of the ‘data persona’ to help them consider personal data profiling and related algorithmic processing of personal digitised information. The literature on social imaginaries is brought together with vital materialism theory, with a focus on identifying the affective forces, relational connections and agential capacities in participants’ imaginaries and experiences concerning data profiling and related practices now and into the future. The participants were aware of how their personal data were generated from their online engagements, and that commercial and government agencies used these data. However, most people suggested that data profiling was only ever partial, configuring a superficial and static version of themselves. They noted that as people move through their life-course, their identities and bodies are subject to change: dynamic and emergent. While the digital data that are generated about humans are also lively, these data can never fully capture the full vibrancy, fluidity and spontaneity of human experience and behaviour. In these imaginaries, therefore, data personas are figured as simultaneously less-than-human and more-than-human. The implications for understanding and theorising human-personal data relations are discussed.
'Keeping It Real': women's Enactments of Lay Health Knowledges and Expertise on Facebook.
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 07-08-2019
Abstract: This article presents findings from a qualitative study concerning Australian women's use of Facebook for health and medical information and support and the implications for understanding modes of lay knowledge and expertise. Thinking with feminist new materialism theory, we identify the relational connections, affective forces and agential capacities described by participants as technological affordances came together with human bodily affordances. Affective forces were a dominant feature in users' accounts. Women were able to make relational connections with peers based on how valid or relevant they found other group members' expertise and experiences, how supportive other members were, how strong they wanted their personal connection to be and how much privacy they wanted to preserve. We identified three modes of engagement: 1) expertise claims based on appropriation and distribution of biomedical knowledge and experience 2) sharing experiential knowledge without claiming expertise and 3) evaluation and use of knowledge presented by others principally through observing. We conclude that an 'expert patient' is someone who is familiar with the rules of engagement on sites such as Facebook and is able to negotiate and understand the affects and levels of disclosure and intimacy that such engagement demands.
The Embodied Computer/User
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 11-1995
Rapid assessment of the biodiversity impacts of the 2019–2020 Australian megafires to guide urgent management intervention and recovery and lessons for other regions
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 21-10-2021
DOI: 10.1111/DDI.13428
Abstract: The incidence of major fires is increasing globally, creating extraordinary challenges for governments, managers and conservation scientists. In 2019–2020, Australia experienced precedent‐setting fires that burned over several months, affecting seven states and territories and causing massive bio ersity loss. Whilst the fires were still burning, the Australian Government convened a bio ersity Expert Panel to guide its bushfire response. A pressing need was to target emergency investment and management to reduce the chance of extinctions and maximise the chances of longer‐term recovery. We describe the approach taken to rapidly prioritise fire‐affected animal species. We use the experience to consider the organisational and data requirements for evidence‐based responses to future ecological disasters. Forested biomes of subtropical and temperate Australia, with lessons for other regions. We developed assessment frameworks to screen fire‐affected species based on their pre‐fire conservation status, the proportion of their distribution overlapping with fires, and their behavioural/ecological traits relating to fire vulnerability. Using formal and informal networks of scientists, government and non‐government staff and managers, we collated expert input and data from multiple sources, undertook the analyses, and completed the assessments in 3 weeks for vertebrates and 8 weeks for invertebrates. The assessments prioritised 92 vertebrate and 213 invertebrate species for urgent management response another 147 invertebrate species were placed on a watchlist requiring further information. The priority species lists helped focus government and non‐government investment, management and research effort, and communication to the public. Using multiple expert networks allowed the assessments to be completed rapidly using the best information available. However, the assessments highlighted substantial gaps in data availability and access, deficiencies in statutory threatened species listings, and the need for capacity‐building across the conservation science and management sectors. We outline a flexible template for using evidence effectively in emergency responses for future ecological disasters.
The use and value of digital media for information about pregnancy and early motherhood: a focus group study
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date: 19-07-2016
Consumerism in the health care setting: an exploratory study of factors underlying the selection and evaluation of primary medical services
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 12-02-2010
DOI: 10.1111/J.1753-6405.1991.TB00334.X
Abstract: Recent policy initiatives in Australia have continued the debate concerning the appropriate model of health care for this country. A market economy model, predicated on the existence of true consumerism, has been promoted by influential organisations to replace the current system. To test the validity of this perception and to explore the level of consumerism which exists in the Australian health care setting, we undertook a cross-sectional survey of general practitioner attenders in the outer western and northern suburbs of Sydney. Three hundred and thirty-three patients from six general practices were polled over a two-week period in March 1990. Far from demonstrating consumerist behaviour (especially the considered selection and evaluation of services), the survey population was strongly attracted to the traditional model of medical care, which is characterised by the trusting and dependent relationship of patients with their doctors.
Animal population decline and recovery after severe fire: Relating ecological and life history traits with expert estimates of population impacts from the Australian 2019-20 megafires
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 07-2023
Towards more-than-human digital data studies: developing research-creation methods
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 14-07-2020
Abstract: As the number of digital technologies expands, entering more domains of everyday life, people’s activities, bodies and preferences are rendered into constantly changing flows of digitised information. The interdisciplinary field of critical data studies has emerged in response. In this article, we outline the design and development of methods employed in our new project ‘Living with Personal Data’ as a move towards expanding the knowledge base and methodological approaches of critical data studies. Our approach takes up more-than-human theoretical perspectives and research-creation methods to elicit the affective and multisensory contexts of people’s feelings, practices and imaginaries concerning their digital data. We describe a set of workshops established to experiment with some new methods we have devised for our project’s fieldwork. The article ends with some reflections on what these theories and methods can offer for a reimagined digital data studies that can acknowledge and surface more-than-human dimensions.
Extensive range contraction predicted under climate warming for two endangered mountaintop frogs from the rainforests of subtropical Australia
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date: 23-11-2022
DOI: 10.1038/S41598-022-24551-5
Abstract: Montane ecosystems cover approximately 20% of the Earth's terrestrial surface and are centres of endemism. Globally, anthropogenic climate change is driving population declines and local extinctions across multiple montane taxa, including hibians. We applied the maximum entropy approach to predict the impacts of climate change on the distribution of two poorly known hibian species ( Philoria kundagungan and Philoria richmondensis ) endemic to the subtropical uplands of the Gondwana Rainforests of Australia, World Heritage Area (GRAWHA). Firstly, under current climate conditions and also future (2055) low and high warming scenarios. We validated current distribution models against models developed using presence-absence field data. Our models were highly concordant with known distributions and predicted the current distribution of P. kundagungan to contract by 64% under the low warming scenario and by 91% under the high warming scenario and that P. richmondensis would contract by 50% and 85%, respectively. With large areas of habitat already impacted by wildfires, conservation efforts for both these species need to be initiated urgently. We propose several options , including establishing ex-situ insurance populations increasing the long-term viability of both species in the wild through conservation translocations.
Food, Memory and Meaning: The Symbolic and Social Nature of Food Events
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 11-1994
DOI: 10.1111/J.1467-954X.1994.TB00105.X
Abstract: Food preparation and consumption practices are considered integral to the maintenance or deterioration of bodily health. As a consequence, in iduals in western societies are regularly exhorted to follow health guidelines in their everyday diets. However many fail to heed this advice. Various reasons have been proposed for lack of behavioural change, but few have fully considered the social function and symbolic meanings of food and eating. This paper presents the findings of an exploratory study using the innovative qualitative research method of memory-work to uncover the meanings surrounding food practices in developed societies. The data used are childhood memories about food written by students at an Australian university. The memories are examined for common themes and patterns, revealing important aspects of the ways in which food contributes to social relationships and cultural practices. The findings provide explanations for in iduals' adherence to certain eating habits and avoidance of others, and point the way towards the further application of memory-work to elucidate the meanings and symbolic role played by food in western societies.
Primary Health Care Consumerism amongst Elderly Australians
Publisher: Oxford University Press (OUP)
Date: 1991
Abstract: Despite acceptance of many of the principles justifying government intervention in health care provision and financing, much recent market-based policy in Australia, the USA and the UK has been based on the assumption that patients have the potential to behave as 'good consumers'. Good consumers are patients with the ability and desire to seek out health care of good quality and reasonable cost. In this paper, an exploratory survey of general practice attenders in Western and Northern Sydney is reported. The aim of the survey was to assess the extent to which patients critically select and evaluate their general practitioner, as a good consumer may be expected to do. The results demonstrate a lack of consumer-oriented behaviour both in general and amongst older respondents in particular. If such results hold true, market-based health care policies relying on consumers to judge quality of care are likely to be detrimental to the health of older people.
Risk
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 21-02-2014
DOI: 10.1002/9781118410868.WBEHIBS060
Abstract: This entry discusses risk as a sociocultural construction and gives ex les of how sociological and anthropological theorists have analyzed risk in relation to health. Three dominant theoretical perspectives are outlined: the risk society approach, based on Ulrich Beck's writings the governmentality perspective, drawing on the work of Michel Foucault and the cultural/symbolic approach, instigated by Mary Douglas's work. The entry shows how each of these perspectives may be used to understand the ways in which the health risks related to overweight and obesity are framed, represented, and understood.
Senior school students' experiences and opinions of school-based HIV-AIDS education
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 08-1997
DOI: 10.1111/J.1467-842X.1997.TB01747.X
Abstract: This article reports the findings from the second part of a two-stage study that used both qualitative and quantitative methods to investigate the communication context of school-based HIV-AIDS education in state secondary schools in metropolitan and rural areas of New South Wales. The quantitative data are here described, focusing on a s le of 1005 Year 12 students' responses to a self-administered questionnaire. The data suggest that the students strongly supported the general idea of school-based HIV-AIDS education, but found current offerings lacking in several respects. Students identified a strong need for information about how HIV and AIDS affect the body, for more information about sexually transmissible diseases other than HIV-AIDS, for people with HIV themselves and experts in the field to provide education sessions, and for more small-group discussions. Rural students and those students from schools located in the outer western suburbs of Sydney in particular reported that they had insufficient access to the modes of information that they most preferred. There were some important differences between the responses of female and male students and between the responses of students from different ethnic groups, suggesting that these factors also need acknowledgment when school-based programs are designed for young people.
The conservation impacts of ecological disturbance: time‐bound estimates of population loss and recovery for fauna affected by the 2019–2020 Australian megafires
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 03-2022
DOI: 10.1111/GEB.13473
Abstract: After environmental disasters, species with large population losses may need urgent protection to prevent extinction and support recovery. Following the 2019–2020 Australian megafires, we estimated population losses and recovery in fire‐affected fauna, to inform conservation status assessments and management. Temperate and subtropical Australia. 2019–2030 and beyond. Australian terrestrial and freshwater vertebrates one invertebrate group. From 1,050 fire‐affected taxa, we selected 173 whose distributions substantially overlapped the fire extent. We estimated the proportion of each taxon’s distribution affected by fires, using fire severity and aquatic impact mapping, and new distribution mapping. Using expert elicitation informed by evidence of responses to previous wildfires, we estimated local population responses to fires of varying severity. We combined the spatial and elicitation data to estimate overall population loss and recovery trajectories, and thus indicate potential eligibility for listing as threatened, or uplisting, under Australian legislation. We estimate that the 2019–2020 Australian megafires caused, or contributed to, population declines that make 70–82 taxa eligible for listing as threatened and another 21–27 taxa eligible for uplisting. If so‐listed, this represents a 22–26% increase in Australian statutory lists of threatened terrestrial and freshwater vertebrates and spiny crayfish, and uplisting for 8–10% of threatened taxa. Such changes would cause an abrupt worsening of underlying trajectories in vertebrates, as measured by Red List Indices. We predict that 54–88% of 173 assessed taxa will not recover to pre‐fire population size within 10 years/three generations. We suggest the 2019–2020 Australian megafires have worsened the conservation prospects for many species. Of the 91 taxa recommended for listing/uplisting consideration, 84 are now under formal review through national processes. Improving predictions about taxon vulnerability with empirical data on population responses, reducing the likelihood of future catastrophic events and mitigating their impacts on bio ersity, are critical.
Caveat emptor or blissful ignorance? Patients and the consumerist ethos
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 1991
DOI: 10.1016/0277-9536(91)90213-V
Abstract: The notion that consumerist behaviour is, or should be, prevalent amongst in iduals seeking health care has underlain recent United States and British governmental policy directives. Consumer groups make similar assumptions when exhorting in iduals to treat health care like any other service. This paper enquires to what extent patients conceive of themselves and others as adopting consumerist behaviour when seeking and evaluating primary health care. Three hundred and thirty-three patients attending general practices in Sydney, Australia, were asked in open-ended questions to state why they chose their regular doctor, why they continued to visit that doctor, if they had ever changed their doctor, if they thought most people could tell if a doctor were good or bad, and what qualities they thought constituted a good and bad doctor. It is concluded that the patients surveyed tended not to think of themselves as consumers who should be wary of the quality of service offered by doctors. Rather they preferred to trust their doctor, and therefore did not devote effort to actively seeking out information about their doctor or evaluating his or her services.
“The right way of doing it all”: First-time Australian mothers' decisions about paid employment
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 2002
'I'm Always on the Lookout for What Could Be Going Wrong': Mothers' Concepts and Experiences of Health and Illness in Their Young Children
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 2012
DOI: 10.2139/SSRN.2062200
Perspectives on power, communication and the medical encounter: implications for nursing theory and practice
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 09-1995
DOI: 10.1111/J.1440-1800.1995.TB00166.X
Abstract: Over the past few decades there has been an increasing push towards 'enhancing' communication in the medical encounter, with a focus on moving towards a 'mutuality' of patient and health care professional that reduces a perceived 'power imbalance' between the two. Doctors in particular have been constructed as dominating and coercive, either consciously or unconsciously repressing patients' capacity for autonomy. Nurses have typically been represented as less authoritarian in their dealings with patients in their idealized role as caring, kindly and empathetic health professionals. It is therefore often argued that the nurse-patient relationship is more 'equal' and less repressive than the doctor-patient relationship. This article explores critically these assertions in the context of the Foucauldian perspective on the role of power in the medical encounter, and draws out implications for nursing theory and practice.
Language matters: the ‘digital twin’ metaphor in health and medicine
Publisher: BMJ
Date: 12-05-2021
You are Your Data: Self-Tracking Practices and Concepts of Data
Publisher: Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden
Date: 2016
‘Honestly no, I’ve never looked at it’: teachers’ understandings and practices related to students’ personal data in digitised health and physical education
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 03-03-2021
Infant embodiment and interembodiment: A review of sociocultural perspectives
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 15-06-2013
Abstract: This article brings together a range of research and scholarship from various disciplines which have investigated and theorized social and cultural aspects of infants’ bodies within the context of contemporary western societies. It begins with a theoretical overview of dominant concepts of infants’ bodies, including discussion of the concepts of the unfinished body, civility and the Self/Other binary opposition as well as that of interembodiment, drawn from the work of Merleau-Ponty. Then follows discussion of the pleasures and challenging aspects of interembodiment in relation to caregivers’ interactions with infants’ bodies, purity, danger and infant embodiment and lastly practices of surveilling the vulnerable, ‘at risk’ infant body.
The experiences of new fatherhood: A socio-cultural analysis
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 04-1999
DOI: 10.1046/J.1365-2648.1999.00978.X
Abstract: For most men, first-time fatherhood involves significant changes in self-identity and their relationship with their female partner. This paper presents some findings from a longitudinal, qualitative study into the first 6 months of new fatherhood for a group of 15 Australian men. The discussion draws on a series of semistructured interviews undertaken on a minimum of four occasions from a few days before the child was born until 5-6 months after birth. We found that first-time fathering in contemporary western society requires men to be simultaneously provider, guide, household help and nurturer. The demands of these roles, and the tensions they sometimes produce, challenge men's relationships with their female partners, the meaning and place of work in their lives and their sense of self as competent adults. Almost all the men we interviewed found the early weeks and months of fatherhood more uncomfortable than rewarding, despite looking forward to fatherhood very positively. Their experience appeared more closely aligned to their difficulties with meeting social expectations and roles rather than in idual deficits.
M-health and health promotion: The digital cyborg and surveillance society
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date: 27-06-2012
DOI: 10.1057/STH.2012.6
The Condom in the Age of AIDS: Newly Respectable or Still a Dirty Word? A Discourse Analysis
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 08-1994
DOI: 10.1177/104973239400400304
Abstract: The condom has been the subject of much publicity over the past five years because of its role in preventing the spread of HIV: However, despite the attempts of health promoters and condom manufacturers to make condoms respectable, they still seem to suffer from stigmatization. This article discusses the representation of condoms in the Australian press. A discourse analysis approach is used to identify the prominent topics, the manifest and latent themes, and the rhetorical devices used in press accounts to portray condoms in the age of AIDS. The results provide some explanation for the continued lack of popularity of condoms by demonstrating the deep cultural anxieties and negative meanings that still surround them. Until these are challenged, it is unlikely that the general population will adopt the use of condoms to protect against the spread of AIDS.
From human-centric digital health to digital One Health: Crucial new directions for mutual flourishing
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 2022
DOI: 10.1177/20552076221129103
Abstract: This brief communication puts forward an argument for expanding the concept of ‘digital health’ to that of ‘digital One Health’ by going beyond a human-centric approach to incorporating nonhuman agents, including other living things, places and space. One Health approaches recognise the interconnected and ecological dimensions of human health and wellbeing, but rarely focus on the role of digital technologies. A set of key questions can take the idea of digital One Health forward: (i) How can we learn more about and establish deeper connections with other animals and the natural environment through digital media, devices and data? (ii) How can we attune humans to these more-than-human worlds using digital technologies, cultivating attentiveness and responsiveness? (iii) How can we better develop and implement digital technologies that support the health and wellbeing of the planet and all its living creatures (including humans) so that all can flourish? and (iv) How can digital technologies affect ecological systems, for better or for worse? Developing digital One Health expands both the digital health field and the One Health perspective, leading them into crucial new directions for mutual flourishing.
Consuming risk, consuming science: The case of GM foods
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 11-2002
DOI: 10.1177/146954050200200304
Abstract: This article presents some findings from a study investigating notions of risk among Britons, with a focus on interviewees working as professionals in high technology (high-tech) or science industries. The discussion examines our interviewees’ responses to risks related to the consumption of genetically modified (GM) food. Our study sought to elicit personal experiences as part of an in idual biography of risk which included specific concerns about food consumption as part of an ‘everyday’ set of risk perceptions. We found that many interviewees enjoyed adopting a ‘scientific knowledge’ identity in the interview, emphasizing seeking ‘fact’ about the risk associated with GM foods from a wide range of media ‘opinion’, and were confident about their own ability to control most risks. However, they also constructed a ‘two nations’ view of a knowledge-based economy, involving a disparity between ‘haves’ (themselves) and others, generally because of the faster, more demanding, no ‘job for life’ nature of the ‘flexible economy’. Consumption - including consumption of science - far from being a democratic equivalence of citizenship, was thus seen as the historical cause of ontological insecurity.
Entrevista com Deborah Lupton
Publisher: Cadernos de Campo: Revista de Ciencias Sociais
Date: 21-08-2023
Critical Perspectives on Digital Health Technologies
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 12-2014
DOI: 10.1111/SOC4.12226
‘The best thing for the baby’: Mothers’ concepts and experiences related to promoting their infants’ health and development
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 10-2011
Young People’s Use of Digital Health Technologies in the Global North: Narrative Review
Publisher: JMIR Publications Inc.
Date: 11-01-2021
DOI: 10.2196/18286
Abstract: A erse array of digital technologies are available to children and young people living in the Global North to monitor, manage, and promote their health and well-being. This article provides a narrative literature review of the growing number of social research studies published over the past decade that investigate the types of digital technologies used by children and young people in the Global North, in addition to investigating which of these technologies they find most useful or not useful. Key findings as well as major gaps and directions for future research are identified and discussed. A comprehensive search of relevant publications listed in Google Scholar was conducted, supported by following citation trails of these publications. The findings are listed under type of digital technology used for health: cross-media, internet, social media, apps and wearable devices, sexual health support and information, and mental health support and information. Many young people in the Global North are active users of digital health technologies. However, it is notable that they still rely on older technologies, such as websites and search engines, to find information. Apps and platforms that may not have been specifically developed for young people as digital health resources often better suit their needs. Young people appreciate the ready availability of information online, the opportunities to learn more about their bodies and health states, and the opportunities to learn how to improve their health and physical fitness. They enjoy being able to connect with peers, and they find emotional support and relief from distress by using social media platforms, YouTube, and online forums. Young people can find the vast reams of information available to them difficult to navigate. They often look to trusted adults to help them make sense of the information they find online and to provide alternative sources of information and support. Face-to-face interactions with these trusted providers remain important to young people. Risks and harms that young people report from digital health use include becoming overly obsessed with their bodies’ shape and size when using self-tracking technologies and comparing their bodies with the social media influencers they follow. Further details on how young people are using social media platforms and YouTube as health support resources and for peer-to-peer sharing of information, including attention paid to the content of these resources and the role played by young social media influencers and microcelebrities, would contribute important insights to this body of literature. The role played by visual media, such as GIFs (Graphics Interchange Format) and memes, and social media platforms that have recently become very popular with young people (eg, Snapchat and TikTok) in health-related content creation and sharing requires more attention by social researchers seeking to better understand young people’s use of digital devices and software for health and fitness.
‘Depends on Who’s Got the Data’: Public Understandings of Personal Digital Dataveillance
Publisher: Queen's University Library
Date: 08-05-2017
Abstract: Post-Snowden, several highly-publicised events and scandals have drawn attention to the use of people’s personal data by other actors and agencies, both legally and illicitly. In this article, we report the findings of a project in which we used cultural probes to generate discussion about personal digital dataveillance. What emerged from our focus groups is a somewhat diffuse but quite extensive understanding on the part of the participants of the ways in which data may be gathered about them and the uses to which these data may be put. We found that the participants tended to veer between recognising the value of both personal data and the big aggregated data sets that their own data may be part of, particularly for their own convenience, and expressing concern or suspicion about how these data may be used by others. Our findings suggest that experimenting with innovative approaches to elicit practices and understandings of personal digital data offers further possibilities for greater depth and breadth of social research with all types of social groups.
Medicine and Health Care in Australia
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 2001
Routledge Handbook of Risk Studies
Publisher: Routledge
Date: 31-03-2016
Unborn Assemblages: Shifting Configurations of Embryonic and Foetal Embodiment
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan UK
Date: 2014
Health promotion in the digital era: a critical commentary
Publisher: Oxford University Press (OUP)
Date: 15-10-2014
Abstract: A range of digitized health promotion practices have emerged in the digital era. Some of these practices are voluntarily undertaken by people who are interested in improving their health and fitness, but many others are employed in the interests of organizations and agencies. This article provides a critical commentary on digitized health promotion. I begin with an overview of the types of digital technologies that are used for health promotion, and follow this with a discussion of the socio-political implications of such use. It is contended that many digitized health promotion strategies focus on in idual responsibility for health and fail to recognize the social, cultural and political dimensions of digital technology use. The increasing blurring between voluntary health promotion practices, professional health promotion, government and corporate strategies requires acknowledgement, as does the increasing power wielded by digital media corporations over digital technologies and the data they generate. These issues provoke questions for health promotion as a practice and field of research that hitherto have been little addressed.
The Embodied Computer/User
Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
Date: 1995
Psychoanalytic sociology and the medical encounter: Parsons and beyond.
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 11-1997
Consumerism, reflexivity and the medical encounter
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 08-1997
DOI: 10.1016/S0277-9536(96)00353-X
Abstract: Much emphasis has been placed recently in sociological, policy and popular discourses on changes in lay people's attitudes towards the medical profession that have been labelled by some as a move towards the embracing of "consumerism". Notions of consumerism tend to assume that lay people act as "rational" actors in the context of the medical encounter. They align with broader sociological concepts of the "reflexive self" as a product of late modernity that is, the self who acts in a calculated manner to engage in self-improvement and who is sceptical about expert knowledges. To explore the ways that people think and feel about medicine and the medical profession, this article draws on findings from a study involving in-depth interviews with 60 lay people from a wide range of backgrounds living in Sydney. These data suggest that, in their interactions with doctors and other health care workers, lay people may pursue both the ideal-type "consumerist" and the "passive patient" subject position simultaneously or variously, depending on the context. The article concludes that late modernist notions of reflexivity as applied to issues of consumerism fail to recognize the complexity and changeable nature of the desires, emotions and needs that characterize the patient-doctor relationship.
‘I am Normal on the ’Net’: Disability, Computerised Communication Technologies and the Embodied Self
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan UK
Date: 2003
Toward a manifesto for the ‘public understanding of big data’
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 13-10-2016
Abstract: In this article, we sketch a ‘manifesto’ for the ‘public understanding of big data’. On the one hand, this entails such public understanding of science and public engagement with science and technology–tinged questions as follows: How, when and where are people exposed to, or do they engage with, big data? Who are regarded as big data’s trustworthy sources, or credible commentators and critics? What are the mechanisms by which big data systems are opened to public scrutiny? On the other hand, big data generate many challenges for public understanding of science and public engagement with science and technology: How do we address publics that are simultaneously the informant, the informed and the information of big data? What counts as understanding of, or engagement with, big data, when big data themselves are multiplying, fluid and recursive? As part of our manifesto, we propose a range of empirical, conceptual and methodological exhortations. We also provide Appendix 1 that outlines three novel methods for addressing some of the issues raised in the article.
Constructing the menopausal body: The discourses on Hormone replacement therapy
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 03-1996
The adolescent 'Unfinished body', reflexivity and HIV/AIDS risk
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 06-1998
DOI: 10.1177/1357034X98004002002
Abstract: School-based sexuality education is a type of sexology directed at specific bodies: `unfinished' adolescent bodies in the process of becoming sexual bodies. This article explores notions of the adolescent `unfinished' body in the context of HIV/AIDS education for young people. Drawing on empirical research carried out in Australian secondary schools, we look at the concepts of the project of the self and reflexivity as they are articulated by young people in their evaluation of HIV/AIDS education. The open character of self identity and the reflexively monitored nature of the body were emphasized by the young people in their attempted construction of intimacy and sexuality. The discourses of openness and trust and the reliance on both `expert' and `experiential' knowledges were evident in the ways in which they dealt with the risk of HIV/AIDS. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications of these data for the theorizing of risk and reflexivity.
Senior school students' experiences and opinions of school–based HIV–AIDS education
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 08-1977
Archetypes of Infection: People with HIV/AIDS in the Australian Press in the Mid 1990s
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 1999
Discourse analysis: a new methodology for understanding the ideologies of health and illness
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 12-02-2010
DOI: 10.1111/J.1753-6405.1992.TB00043.X
Abstract: Discourse analysis is an interdisciplinary field of inquiry which has been little employed by public health practitioners. The methodology involves a focus upon the sociocultural and political context in which text and talk occur. Discourse analysis is, above all, concerned with a critical analysis of the use of language and the reproduction of dominant ideologies (belief systems) in discourse (defined here as a group of ideas or patterned way of thinking which can both be identified in textual and verbal communications and located in wider social structures). Discourse analysis adds a linguistic approach to an understanding of the relationship between language and ideology, exploring the way in which theories of reality and relations of power are encoded in such aspects as the syntax, style and rhetorical devices used in texts. This paper argues that discourse analysis is pertinent to the concerns of public health, for it has the potential to lay bare the ideological dimension of such phenomena as lay health beliefs, the doctor-patient relationship, and the dissemination of health information in the entertainment mass media. This dimension is often neglected by public health research. The method of discourse analysis is explained, and ex les of its use in the area of public health given.
‘A healthy lifestyle might be the death of you’: discourses on diet, cholesterol control and heart disease in the press and among the lay public
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 09-1995
Digital methods
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 23-10-2013
'Life would be pretty dull without risk': Voluntary risk-taking and its pleasures
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 07-2002
Just a machine? dehumanizing strategies in personal computer use
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 06-1997
‘I Just Want It to Be Done, Done, Done!’ Food Tracking Apps, Affects, and Agential Capacities
Publisher: MDPI AG
Date: 23-05-2018
DOI: 10.3390/MTI2020029
Risk Revisited, Pat Caplan (ed.), London: Pluto Press, 2000, £45.00 (£14.99 pbk), vi+258 pp. (ISBN: 0-7453-1463-5)
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 02-2001
Risk and Everyday Life
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date: 25-07-2005
Photodiagnosis of genital herpes and warts: a sociomaterial perspective on users’ experiences of online sexual health care
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 17-02-2022
Psychoanalytic Sociology and the Medical Encounter: Parsons and Beyond
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 11-1997
The heart of the meal: food preferences and habits among rural Australian couples
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 2000
Parenting and Digital Media: From the Early Web to Contemporary Digital Society
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 08-2016
DOI: 10.1111/SOC4.12398
The Sociology of Medical Screening: Critical Perspectives, New Directions. Edited by Natalie Armstrong and Helen Eborall. Chichster: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012. Pp. vi+154. $39.95 (paper).
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Date: 11-2013
DOI: 10.1086/672362
Twitter: social communication in the digital age
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 17-06-2013
Coping with COVID-19: The sociomaterial dimensions of living with pre-existing mental illness during the early stages of the coronavirus crisis
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 02-2022
Critical health education studies: Reflections on a new conference and this themed symposium
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 09-07-2019
Abstract: In May 2018, a group of scholars gathered in the icy and sunlit grandeur of Queenstown (Aotearoa New Zealand) to talk, debate and share ideas about health education. The conference aimed to trouble and disrupt traditional kinds of health education and, instead, suggest possibilities for the critical study of health education – both in terms of theory and practice. This introduction to the special themed symposium is a reflection by the six authors on that new conference – Critical Studies in Health Education (CHESS) – and what it aimed to achieve. The authors discuss and define the intent of critical approaches to health education, and reflect on their experiences of the conference, as well as the future of the field. Papers in this special themed symposium of Health Education Journal are also introduced.
Infinitesimal risk as public health crisis: News media coverage of a doctor-patient HIV contact tracing investigation
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 12-1996
DOI: 10.1016/0277-9536(95)00402-5
Abstract: Among the most prominent health or medical stories covered in 1994 by the Australian news media was that concerning an HIV positive hospital obstetrician and the attempt by the New South Wales Health Department to trace and test 149 women on whom he had operated. All press and television coverage of the issue was reviewed. The surface news narrative of the search for missing, "innocent" mothers potentially infected with a deadly and infectious illness is shown to serve as a "hard news" pretext enabling a wider major discourse to operate about a health system accused as being captive to gay and civil libertarian politics, allowing "guilty" doctors at high risk of HIV to endanger "innocent" patients. Expert consensus held that the women were at "infinitesimal risk" of acquiring HIV. However, media accounts of the investigation all but belied this, illustrating that the news media's framing of risk has more to do with its reproduction of moral outrage components than with "scientific" notions of calculable risk.
‘They’ve forgotten that I’m the mum’: constructing and practising motherhood in special care nurseries
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 10-2001
DOI: 10.1016/S0277-9536(00)00396-8
Abstract: Little sociological research has sought to investigate the ways in which women with hospitalized newborn infants construct and practice motherhood. This article seeks to address this lacuna, using data from a qualitative research project based in two Australian neonatal nurseries. Thirty-one mothers of hospitalized newborns and 20 neonatal nurses were interviewed, and other data were obtained via observations of the nurseries, tape-recorded verbal interactions between parents and nursery staff and casual conversations with mothers and nurses. The data revealed that while the mothers' and nurses' discourses on what makes a 'good mother' in the context of the neonatal nursery converged to some extent, there were important differences. The mothers particularly emphasized the importance of physical contact with their infants and breastfeeding, while the nurses privileged presence in the nursery and willingness to learn about the infant's condition and treatment. There was evidence of power struggles between the mothers and nurses over the handling and treatment of the infants, which had implications for how the mothers constructed and practised motherhood. The mothers attempted to construct themselves as 'real mothers', which involved establishing connection with their infants and normalizing them. In time, many of the mothers sought to position themselves as the 'experts' on their infants. For their part, the nurses attempted to position themselves as 'teachers and monitors of the parents', 'protectors of the infants' and 'experts' by virtue of their medical training and experience. Differences in defining the situation resulted in frustration, resentment and anger on the part of the mothers and disciplinary and surveillance actions on the part of many of the nurses, both covert and overt. The nurses' attitude to and treatment of the mothers was integral in the development of the mothers' relationship with their infants in the nurseries, and this influence extended beyond discharge of the infants.
An approach to homogenize daily peak wind gusts: An application to the Australian series
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 13-12-2018
DOI: 10.1002/JOC.5949
Technology, selfhood and physical disability
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 06-2000
DOI: 10.1016/S0277-9536(99)00422-0
Abstract: Much has been written in recent times of the interface between technologies and the human body. The vast majority of this literature, however, focuses on a body that is assumed to be free of physical disability. This article seeks to address this lacuna by presenting findings from an exploratory study using in-depth interviews with fifteen people with physical disabilities living in the Australian city of Adelaide. The dominant research question was to explore the ways in which technologies contribute to the meanings and experiences of the lived body/self with disabilities. The data showed that the interviewees identified several technologies that they used as highly beneficial to allowing them to transcend some aspects of their disabilities. However, the interviewees also identified significant negative aspects to the use of some technologies. They noted that such technologies could serve to mark out people with disabilities as 'different' or 'lacking', acting as a barrier to the achievement and presentation of their preferred body/self.
Femininity, Responsibility, and the Technological Imperative: Discourses on Breast Cancer in the Australian Press
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 1994
DOI: 10.2190/1B6J-1P5R-AXCR-MRNY
Abstract: The manner in which the popular press represents health issues influences, and is demonstrative of, societal attitudes toward illnesses and those who suffer from them. Cancer is one of the most feared diseases in modern society, and breast cancer attacks women at the bodily site where notions of femininity intersect. This article examines the discourses surrounding breast cancer as represented in the Australian press in the period between 1987 and 1990. It is argued that the press's portrayal of breast cancer during that time drew upon dominant cultural metaphors and discourses concerning femininity, the in idual's responsibility for illness, and medical and technological dominance.
Doctors on the Medical Profession
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 09-1997
Digitised health, medicine and risk
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 02-2016
Personal Data Practices in the Age of Lively Data
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 2015
DOI: 10.2139/SSRN.2636709
The Social Construction of Medicine and the Body
Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
Date: 2000
Threats and thrills: pregnancy apps, risk and consumption
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 24-12-2015
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