"Critical Reflections on Audience and Narrativity—New connections, New perspectives" offers an interdisciplinary and multicultural approach to fiction, reality, and narrativity applied to television series from all over the world. Dissecting the almost invisible barrier between fiction and reality in TV series from various perspectives, the chapters cover a wide range of contemporary classics from the post-network age. From "The X-Files" and "Desperate Housewives" to "The Wire" and "Breaki...

Health is a contested concept that has been defined in numerous ways. The media is extremely powerful in promoting health beliefs and in creating role models for contemporary people. The ways in which health is defined or understood can have wide-ranging implications and can have an impact on issues such as health promotion or health literacy. Health presentation in the media has a significant social impact because this type of message is important in changing people's beliefs, attitudes a...

Analyzing the relationship between medicine and the media from different perspectives, these new essays fill a gap in this emerging field, providing new information on approaches to health communication and important reevaluations of health literacy theories.The contributors discuss ideas and methodologies across a range of topics, including multifaceted health communication, media coverage of maternal health, the rhetoric of diagnosis in autoimmune illness, media representation of...

Media Events: A Critical Contemporary Approach proposes an interdisciplinary and multicultural approach of Dayan and Katz's theory of media events (1992) by applying it to contemporary situations. The contributing authors come from a range of countries (UK, USA, Mexico, Germany, Finland, Italy, Greece, Portugal, Ukraine) and analyse the theory of media events from different perspectives, incorporating social media and offering a re-positioning of Dayan and Katz's theory of media events. By...

Where do our conventional understandings of health, illness, and the body stem from? What makes them authoritative? How are the boundaries set around these areas of life unsettled in the changing historical and political contexts of science, technology, and health care delivery? These questions are at the heart of Troubling Natural Categories, a collection of essays honouring the tradition of Margaret Lock, one of the preeminent medical anthropologists of our time.Througho...

The medical establishment has become a major threat to health'. So begins Ivan Illich's spirited and reasoned attack upon the mythic prestige of contemporary medicines, examining the customs and rituals conducted by the medical profession. Relentlessly and with full documentation taken from recognized medical sources Illich proves the impotence of medical services to change life expectancy, the insignificance of most clinical care in curing disease, the magnitude of medically inflicted dam...

In 2014, California suffered the largest and deadliest outbreak of pertussis, also known as "whooping cough," in more than fifty years. This tragedy was avoidable. An effective vaccine has been available since the 1940s. In recent years other diseases, like measles and mumps, have also made a comeback. The reason for these epidemics can be traced to a group whose vocal proponents insist, despite evidence to the contrary, that vaccines are poison. As a consequence, parents and caretakers ar...

For nearly thirty years, anthropologist and physician Paul Farmer has traveled to some of the most impoverished places on earth to bring comfort and the best possible medical care to the poorest of the poor. Driven by his stated intent to "make human rights substantial," Farmer has treated patients—and worked to address the root causes of their disease—in Haiti, Boston, Peru, Rwanda, and elsewhere in the developing world. In 1987, with several colleagues, he founded Partners In Health to p...

"A splendid history of mind-body medicine...a book that desperately needed to be written."—Jerome Groopman, New York TimesIs stress a deadly disease on the rise in modern society? Can mind-body practices from the East help us become well? When it comes to healing, we believe we must look beyond doctors and drugs; we must look within ourselves. Faith, relationships, and attitude matter.But why do we believe such things? From psychoanalysis to the placebo effect to m...

Never in human history was there such a chance for freedom of expression. If we have Internet access, any one of us can publish almost anything we like and potentially reach an audience of millions. Never was there a time when the evils of unlimited speech flowed so easily across frontiers: violent intimidation, gross violations of privacy, tidal waves of abuse. A pastor burns a Koran in Florida and UN officials die in Afghanistan.   Drawing on a lifetime of writing about dictato...

This is Book 1 of 7 in the Ethnographer's Toolkit, Second Edition.The Ethnographer's Toolkit series begins with this primer, which introduces novice and expert practitioners alike to the process of ethnographic research, including answers to questions such as who should and can do ethnography, when it is used most fruitfully, and how research projects are carried out from conceptualization to the uses of research results. Written in practical, straightforward language, this new edi...

How have professional communicators transformed the business of politics? How do political bodies use the media to sell domestic and foreign policies to the public? This fully revised new edition of The Media and Political Process assesses the impact of spin doctoring and media activity in liberal democracies that are just as concerned with impression management and public relations as with policy.Political processes never stand still, and this revised second editi...