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In this paper we examine how popular media reporting positions dating and hookup app use as a 'social problem' that impacts on health and wellbeing. The paper adopts a mixed-methods media studies approach to create and analyse a dataset of over 6,000 international news articles published within a 12-month period, drawing on thematic content analysis and inductive and deductive techniques. These analyses are framed in relation to online consultations with Australian sexual health professionals and app users. Applying Briggs and Hallin's theory of biocommunicability (2007) – which proposes that contemporary health professionals' scientific framing of public health problems are, in part, shaped by popular media discourses – we identify a significant category of supportive discussions of safer app use within social news and lifestyle reporting. This discursive space features what we have termed 'vernacular pedagogies' of app use, revealing app users' safety strategies, and their experiences of pleasure and playfulness. We argue that an analysis of popular media can provide valuable insights into how everyday experiences of safety, risk and wellbeing are being shaped and contested with dating and hookup app use, and that these insights can be used to develop meaningful health promotion strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper concerns itself with some of the consequences of legislatively supported public health interventions into smoking. These have emerged from the legislative environment of 'smokefree' in Australia, and centrally concern the constitution of public space under its operation; the conceptualisation of risk which circulates within it; and the way in which agency may be imagined in public health framings of smoking. I make a critical anthropological analysis of the ways in which risk, agency and a certain kind of public are imagined and brought to bear on smokers in particular ways. The paper is equally an invitation into the social practice of smoking, as it is undertaken by smokers and as I have ethnographically encountered smoking practice since I began work in the area in 2005. Both the critical analysis and the invitation are difficult to make in a context where research on smoking is increasingly expected to contribute to a public health cessation agenda. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on Foucault's conceptualisation of power, this paper examines public health as a distinctly modern regime of governance. An account of the historical regulation of drug use is traced in order to examine socio-historical shifts and lines of continuity in contemporary technologies of harm reduction. Using qualitative interview data, we examined practices of power in the context of contemporary drug use, including self-governance using techniques of monitoring, self-management and self-tracking. Participants' accounts revealed that they were encouraged to self-govern their drug use through a variety of reformist technologies that are embedded in harm-reduction programs. It is argued that participants' subjectivity is formed at the intersection of authoritative governance and self-governance, through ethical practices of the self which have emerged from disciplinary health practices, and incorporate the body as the site of power. We illustrate this by drawing a distinction between hygienist and sanitationist practices of public health. These governmental practices, which are embedded in public health programs, encourage people who use drugs to transform themselves into moral citizens, aligning their ethical practices with governing interests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Australia we have become preoccupied with the potential adverse impact of our ageing population on our health and social systems. The projected cost of having increasing proportions of our population in the over 70s, retired, chronically ill category of the demographic profile is emerging as a major challenge for governments and private insurers: so much so in fact that the government is now urging older people to stay at work longer. In America, new approaches to the management and self-management of chronic diseases have been invoked to encourage and support older people to improve their quality of life and reduce their recourse to and dependence upon health care technologies, clinical interventions and health care management systems. Unless this is achieved, it is argued, the cost of looking after this emerging ‘bubble’ of elderly people will become increasingly unsustainable as fewer and fewer (proportionately) younger people work to pay the taxes that support ageing, retired, sick and dependent populations. This paper argues that we are at real risk of having our economic wealth and productivity impeded and truncated by the financial burden of looking after high demand and high cost dependants at the aged end of the social demographic. This paper offers an alternative view of our ageing population, as well as highlighting some of the assets we have in our elderly populations, and providing suggestions as to an alternative view of the phenomenon of ageing that incorporates elements such as flexible working arrangements and the application of new, enabling technologies. This approach to our ageing population dilemma is predicated on a concept of lifelong learning and social participation along with better preventive and early intervention systems of health care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the way some public health campaigns in Australia have been caught within a paradigm shift in the management of 'risk society'. It details this paradigm shift in terms of an intensification of political technologies of 'pre-emption' in response to incalculable threats to physical security. The challenge this presents to public health programs, particularly those dealing with 'life style' health problems such as obesity, depression, and drugs (illegal and legal), is that, in pursuing admirable aims of the prevention of ill-health in the population, such campaigns need to avoid reproducing (and indeed should counter) the harmful effects of the pre-emptive approach to security. Using the example of 'quit smoking' campaigns of 2006-7, key features of the preemption paradigm are outlined, particularly the conservative comportment toward the future that it fosters. With reference to Foucault's concept of 'political technologies of bodies' and Merleau-Ponty's ideas about the temporality and intercorporeality of bodies, the paper also explores deleterious effects of this approach to risk and health on human agency, well-being, and social relations in general. The negative impact of the pre-emption approach is outlined in terms of the way it tends to dampen the openness (or 'potentiality') of bodies toward the future, the world, and other people. However, the temporality and intercorporeality of bodies also explains the operation of resistance by human agents to both the paradigm of pre-emption and the health prevention strategies that employ its way of thinking. This provides the basis for a gesture toward a more 'democratic', respectful, and effective approach to the promotion of health and well-being. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As Leader of the Opposition in 1987, the current Prime Minister of Australia John Howard, stated unequivocally that he would dismantle Medicare at his first opportunity. By April 2000, the Health Minister in a Howard-led government proudly proclaimed to the Australian Parliament the Coalition was 'the best friend Medicare ever had'. Such a shift in ideology and policy position appears remarkable, overturning more than 60 years of conservative opposition to a universal, publicly funded, health care system. This paper traces the shift from the lead-up to the 1996 election until 2000, interrogating official policy texts to map how the Coalition reconfigured its own policy narrative about the Australian health care system. This paper argues that in order to understand contemporary reforms to the health care system, we must consider the way in which those reforms provide solutions to discursively, rather than objectively constructed, policy problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]