AIDS, Rhetoric, and Medical Knowledge

AIDS, Rhetoric, and Medical Knowledge
Author: Alex Preda
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 296
Release: 2004-11-29
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9781139442701

This 2005 book examines the formation of scientific knowledge about the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s and shows the broader cultural assumptions which grounded this knowledge. Alex Preda highlights the metaphors, narratives, and classifications which framed scientific hypotheses about the nature of the infectious agent and its transmission ways and compares these arguments with those used in the scientific knowledge about SARS. Through detailed rhetorical analysis of biomedical publications, the author shows how knowledge about epidemics is shaped by cultural narratives and categories of social thought. Preda situates his analysis in the broader frame of the world risk society, where scientific knowledge is called upon to support and shape public policies about prevention and health maintenance, among others. But can these policies avoid the influence of cultural narratives and of social classifications? The book shows how culture matters for prevention and health policies, as well as with respect to how scientific research is organized and funded.

Post-AIDS Discourse in Health Communication

Post-AIDS Discourse in Health Communication
Author: Ambar Basu
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 278
Release: 2021-12-14
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1000510611

This book examines the discourse of a "post-AIDS" culture, and the medical-discursive shift from crisis and death to survival and living. Contributions from a diverse group of international scholars interrogate and engage with the cultural, social, political, scientific, historical, global, and local consumptions of the term "post-AIDS" from the perspective of meaning-making on health, illness, and well-being. The chapters critique and connect meanings of "post-AIDS" to topics such as neoliberalism; race, gender, and advocacy; disclosure; relationships and intimacy; stigma and structural violence; family and community; migration; work; survival; normativity; NGOs, transnational organizations; aging and end-of-life care; the politics of ART and PrEP; mental illness; campaigns; social media; and religion. Using a range of methodological tools, the scholarship herein asks how "post-AIDS" or the "End of the Epidemic" is communicated and made sense of in everyday discourse, what current meanings are circulated and consumed on and around HIV and AIDS, and provides thorough commentary and critique of a "post-AIDS" time. This book will be an essential read for scholars and students of health communication, sociology of health and illness, medical humanities, political science, and medical anthropology, as well as for policy makers and activists.

Risky Rhetoric

Risky Rhetoric
Author: J. Blake Scott
Publisher: SIU Press
Total Pages: 308
Release: 2003
Genre: HIV infections
ISBN: 9780809324941

Risky Rhetoric: AIDS and the Cultural Practices of HIV Testing is the first book-length study of the rhetoric inherent in and surrounding HIV testing. In addition to providing a history of HIV testing in the United States from 1985 to the present, J. Blake Scott explains how faulty arguments about testing’s power and effects have promoted unresponsive and even dangerous testing practices for so-called normal subjects as well as those deemed risky. Drawing on classical rhetoric as well as Michel Foucault’s theorizing of the examination as a form of disciplinary power, this study explores how HIV testing functions as a disciplinary technology that shapes subjects and exerts power over individual bodies and populations. Testing has largely been deployed to protect those defined as normal members of the general population by detecting, managing, and even punishing those diagnosed as risky (e.g., gay and bisexual men, poor women of color). But Scott reveals that testing’s function of protection-through-detection has been fueled in part by faulty arguments that exaggerate testing’s interventive power and benefits. These arguments have also created a perception that testing is a magic bullet. By overestimating the benefits of HIV testing and overlooking its contingencies and harmful effects, dominant arguments about testing have enabled a shortsighted public health response to HIV and unresponsive testing policies. The ultimate goal of Risky Rhetoric: AIDS and the Cultural Practices of HIV Testing is to offer strategies to policymakers, HIV educators and test counselors, and other rhetors for developing more responsive and egalitarian testing-related rhetorics and practices.

International Politics of HIV/AIDS

International Politics of HIV/AIDS
Author: Hakan Seckinelgin
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 206
Release: 2007-08-07
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 1134123736

This book examines the global governance of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, interrogating the role of this international system and global discourse on HIV/AIDS interventions. The geographical focus is Sub-Saharan Africa since the region has been at the forefront of these interventions. There is a need to understand the relationship between the international political environment and the impact of resulting policies on HIV/AIDS in the context of people’s lives. Hakan Seckinelgin points out a certain disjuncture between this governance structures and the way people experience the disease in their everyday lives. Although the structure allows people to emerge as policy relevant target groups and beneficiaries, the articulation of needs and design of policy interventions tends to reflect international priorities rather than people’s thinking on the problem. In other words, he argues that while the international interventions highlight the importance attributed to the HIV/AIDS problem, the nature of the system does not allow interventions to be far reaching and sustainable. Offering a critical contribution to the understanding of the problems in HIV/AIDS in Sub-Saharan Africa, International Politics of HIV/AIDS will be invaluable to students and researchers of health, international politics and development.

Mapping AIDS

Mapping AIDS
Author: Lukas Engelmann
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 267
Release: 2018-11-08
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 1108658830

In this innovative study, Lukas Engelmann examines visual traditions in modern medical history through debates about the causes, impact and spread of AIDS. Utilising medical AIDS atlases produced between 1986 and 2008 for a global audience, Engelmann argues that these visual textbooks played a significant part in the establishment of AIDS as a medical phenomenon. However, the visualisations risked obscuring the social, cultural and political complexity of AIDS history. Photographs of patients were among the earliest responses to the mysterious syndrome, cropped and framed to deliver a visible characterisation of AIDS to a medical audience. Maps then offered an abstracted image of the regions invaded by the epidemic, while the icon of the virus aspired to capture the essence of AIDS. The epidemic's history is retold through clinical photographs, epidemiological maps and icons of HIV, asking how this devastating epidemic has come to be seen as a controllable chronic condition.

‘Ending AIDS’ in the Age of Biopharmaceuticals

‘Ending AIDS’ in the Age of Biopharmaceuticals
Author: Tony Sandset
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 124
Release: 2020-09-02
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 0429589352

This book considers the change in rhetoric surrounding the treatment of AIDS from one of crisis to that of ‘ending AIDS’. Exploring what it means to ‘end AIDS’ and how responsibility is framed in this new discourse, the author considers the tensions generated between the individual and the state in terms of notions such as risk, responsibility and prevention. Based on analyses public health promotions in the UK and the US, HIV prevention science and engaging with the work of Foucault, this volume argues that the discourse of ‘ending AIDS’ implies a tension-filled space in which global principles and values may clash with localised needs, values and concerns; in which evidence-based policies strive for hegemony over local, tacit and communal regimes of knowledge; and in which desires compete with national and international ideas about what is best for the individual in the name of ‘ending AIDS’ writ large. As such, it will appeal to scholars of sociology and media studies with interests in the sociology of medicine and health, medical communication and health policy.

The Cambridge Companion to Gay and Lesbian Writing

The Cambridge Companion to Gay and Lesbian Writing
Author: Hugh Stevens
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 271
Release: 2011
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0521888441

In the last two decades, lesbian and gay studies have transformed literary studies. The Cambridge Companion to Gay and Lesbian Writing introduces readers to important concepts, methods and cultural and historical debates relevant to the study of sexuality and literature.

Research Methods in Health Communication

Research Methods in Health Communication
Author: Bryan B. Whaley
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 387
Release: 2014-07-11
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1136294457

This volume provides an essential roster of primary research methods as they apply to health communication inquiry. Editor Bryan B. Whaley brings together key health communication researchers to write about their primary methodological areas. Their chapters offer guidance and insights for a variety of approaches to answering research questions. The methods included here cover: Exploration and Description: interview/focus groups, case study, ethnography, and surveys; Examining Messages and Interpersonal Exchanges: narrative analysis, conversational analysis, analyzing physician-patient interactions, social network analysis, and content analysis; Causal Explication: experimental research, meta-analysis, and meta-synthesis; and Cultural, Population, and Critical Concerns: rhetorical methods and criticism, and methodological issues when investigating stigmatized populations, and groups with health disparities. Chapters cite or use examples from allied health areas -- nursing, public health, sociology, medicine -- to demonstrate the breadth of health communication studies. This work highlights the importance of methodology in health communication research in multiple contexts. Developed to provide a fundamental reference for investigating health communication, this volume will serve as an invaluable tool for researchers and students across the social science and health disciplines.

Bioethics in Historical Perspective

Bioethics in Historical Perspective
Author: Sarah Ferber
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 248
Release: 2013-11-28
Genre: History
ISBN: 1137265655

How influential has the Nazi analogy been in recent medical debates on euthanasia? Is the history of eugenics being revived in modern genetic technologies? And what does the tragic history of thalidomide and its recent reintroduction for new medical treatments tell us about how governments solve ethical dilemmas? Bioethics in Historical Perspective shows how our understanding of medical history still plays a part in clinical medicine and medical research today. With clear and balanced explanations of complex issues, this extensively documented set of case studies in biomedical ethics explores the important role played by history in thinking about modern medical practice and policy. This book provides student readers with up-to-date information about issues in bioethics, as well as a guide to the most influential ethical standpoints. New twists added to well-known stories will engage those more familiar with the challenging field of contemporary bioethics.

Medicine and Health in Africa

Medicine and Health in Africa
Author: Paula Viterbo
Publisher: MSU Press
Total Pages: 215
Release: 2011-06-01
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 1628954906

Over the last two decades, the implosion of economies under the burden of debt, the negative repercussions of structural adjustment programs, the crisis of legitimacy, civil wars, and the collapse of some states have resulted in serious health issues across the African continent. Newly emerging diseases, such as Ebola virus and HIV/AIDS have killed and disabled millions. Some “old diseases,” such as yellow fever, tuberculosis, and polio have reappeared. Malaria, cholera, and meningitis continue to kill thousands. In many countries, the medical infrastructure has collapsed, while an increasing number of physicians and nurses have migrated to more hospitable places. Stigmatization of the affected people has exacerbated social and racial discrimination and has affected the implementation of national and international public health programs. The complexity of the situation requires an interdisciplinary approach. This collection, including contributions by historians, sociologists, anthropologists, and biologists, emphasizes the social and cultural contexts of African health, paying particular attention to the history of the colonial public health system and its legacy.