As people use self-tracking devices and other digital technologies, they generate increasing quantities of personal information online. These data have many benefits, but they can also be accessed and exploited by third parties.Using rich examples from popular culture and empirical research, Deborah Lupton develops a fresh and intriguing perspective on how people make sense of and use their personal data, and what they know about others who use this information. Drawing on feminist...

Lupton′s newest edition of Medicine as Culture is more relevant than ever.Trudy Rudge, Professor of Nursing, University of SydneyA welcome update of a text that has become a mainstay of the medical sociologist′s library.Alan Radley, Emeritus Professor of Social Psychology, Loughborough UniversityMedicine as Culture introduces students to a broad range of cross-disciplinary theoretical perspectives, using examples that emphas...

Lupton′s newest edition of Medicine as Culture is more relevant than ever.Trudy Rudge, Professor of Nursing, University of SydneyA welcome update of a text that has become a mainstay of the medical sociologist′s library.Alan Radley, Emeritus Professor of Social Psychology, Loughborough UniversityMedicine as Culture introduces students to a broad range of cross-disciplinary theoretical perspectives, using examples that emphas...

With the advent of digital devices and software, self-tracking practices have gained new adherents and have spread into a wide array of social domains. The Quantified Self movement has emerged to promote 'self-knowledge through numbers'.In this groundbreaking book Deborah Lupton critically analyses the social, cultural and political dimensions of contemporary self-tracking and identifies the concepts of selfhood and human embodiment and the value of the data that underpin them....

COVID Societies presents a compelling and accessible overview of key sociocultural theories that can help us make sense of the diverse, dynamic and complex elements of the COVID crisis. These include discussions of the political economy perspective; biopolitics; risk society and cultures; gender and queer theory; and more-than-human theory. The book provides insights into everyday life around the world as people battled with containing the pandemic and explores the broader histori...

We are living in a world in which the existence of risk is constantly debated, misinformation and disinformation are rife and spread quickly and easily through online media, and where governments and institutions continue to avoid taking decisive action even when there is general agreement that a serious threat exists. Understanding how people, social groups and social organizations understand, respond to and act on threats, hazards and dangers is more important than ever. In Risk...

'The internet is made of cats' is a half-jokingly made claim. Today, animals of all shapes and sizes inhabit our digital spaces, including companion animals, wildlife, feral animals and livestock.In this book, Deborah Lupton explores how digital technologies and datafication are changing our relationships with other animals. Playfully building on the concept of 'The Internet of Things', she discusses the complex feelings that have developed between people and anima...

The rise of digital health technologies is, for some, a panacea to many of the medical and public health challenges we face today. This is the first book to articulate a critical response to the techno-utopian and entrepreneurial vision of the digital health phenomenon. Deborah Lupton, internationally renowned for her scholarship on the sociocultural and political aspects of medicine and health as well as digital technologies, addresses a range of compelling issues about the interests digi...

Risk and Everyday Life examines how people respond to, experience and think about risk as part of their everyday lives.Bringing together original empirical research and sociocultural theory, the authors examine how people define risk and what risks they see as affecting them, for example in relation to immigration, employment and family life. They emphasise the need to take account of the cultural dimensions of risk and risk-taking to understand how risk is experie...

In this wide-ranging and thought-provoking analysis of the sociocultural and personal meanings of food and eating, Deborah Lupton explores the relationship between food and embodiment, the emotions and subjectivity. She includes discussion of the intertwining of food, meaning and culture in the context of childhood and the family, as well as: the gendered social construction of foodstuffs; food tastes, dislikes and preferences; the dining-out experience; spirituality; and the `civilized′ b...

In contemporary western societies, the fat body has become a focus of stigmatizing discourses and practices aimed at disciplining, regulating and containing it. Despite the fact that in many western countries fat bodies outnumber those that are thin, fat people are still socially marginalized, and treated with derision and even repulsion and disgust. Medical and public health experts continue to insist that an ‘obesity epidemic’ exists and that fatness is a pathological condition which sho...

`This addition to a growing number of texts which approach emotions and emotionality from a social constructionist perspective is well written, scholarly, accessible and interesting....There is both breadth and depth to this work.′ - Feminism and PsychologyThis broad-ranging and accessible book brings together social and cultural theory with original empirical research into the nature of the emotional self in contemporary western societies....