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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]

The global economic turmoil that has unfolded since August 2007 promises to change methods for the governance of ageing in ways yet unknown. Against this background, this paper asks how the demographic shifts associated with population ageing interact with other aspects of globalisation: the financialisation of economic systems, changing patterns of migration and transformations to health provision. The emphasis is on understanding the complex interplay between these processes and their relevance for rethinking approaches to population ageing in a time of uncertain transition. Questioning the tendency to understand these fields of change as precipitating distinct crises, the paper suggests that the relative predictability of global population ageing makes it an appropriate area in which to begin a reassessment of wider policy directions. [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]

Food is a significant part of the daily worship, health and social life of individuals across cultures and religions. This is especially the case for vegetarian religious minorities such as the Indian sub-continental borne Hare Krishna movement, the Christian Seventh-Day Adventist Church and various Buddhist groups. These devotees define spirituality as more than simply the state or quality of being committed to 'God', religion and immaterial spiritual concerns. This paper argues that there are visible, tangible and even biological frames of reference from which spirituality within the aforementioned religious groups should be considered. The concept of bio-spirituality introduced here, embodies and grounds matters pertinent to faith, health and worship in the everyday social actions and interactions of devotees both inside and outside the sphere of the temple or church. Bio-spirituality is a conceptual tool that accounts for the relationship between supernatural belief, and the natural physical environment. It was formulated to encapsulate the social, nutritional and spiritual dimensions of 18 self-identified religious vegetarians who were interviewed as part of larger qualitative study of alternative food habits and practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the use of the categories bisexual and men who have sex with men (MSM) in sex, sexuality and sexual health research. We study the deployment of these categories in the research literature, using sets of studies published between 1990 and 2004 (bisexual set: n = 2,859; MSM set: n = 986). These sets were established using an approach developed by the authors in an earlier review of sexual health literature for the World Health Organisation (WHO). The approach uses insights from Weberian methodology. We ascribe value to research outcomes which provide contextually sensitive evidence for the design and/or evaluation of sexual health interventions, and are concerned about the creation within research of subjects who become reduced to risky or at-risk groups, or subject of public health surveillance and control. The categories bisexual and MSM are mostly ascribed without attention to social or cultural settings, and to designate risky or at-risk populations or behaviours. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]