In a digital world where the public’s voice is growing increasingly strong, how can health experts best exert influence to contain the global spread of infectious diseases? Digital media sites provide an important source of health information, however are also powerful platforms for the public to air personal experiences and concerns. This has led to a growing phenomenon of civil skepticism towards health issues including Emerging Infectious Diseases and epidemics. Following the shift in the role of the public from recipients to a vocal entity, this book explores the different organizational strategies for communicating public health information and identifies common misconceptions that can inhibit effective communication with the public. Drawing on original research and a range of global case studies, this timely volume offers an important assessment of the complex dynamics at play in managing risk and informing public health decisions. Providing thought-provoking analysis of the implications for future health communication policy and practice, this book is primarily suitable for academics and graduate students interested in understanding how public health communication has changed. It may also be useful to health care professionals.

In a digital world where the public’s voice is growing increasingly strong, how can health experts best exert influence to contain the global spread of infectious diseases? Digital media sites provide an important source of health information, however are also powerful platforms for the public to air personal experiences and concerns. This has led to a growing phenomenon of civil skepticism towards health issues including Emerging Infectious Diseases and epidemics. Following the shift in the role of the public from recipients to a vocal entity, this book explores the different organizational strategies for communicating public health information and identifies common misconceptions that can inhibit effective communication with the public. Drawing on original research and a range of global case studies, this timely volume offers an important assessment of the complex dynamics at play in managing risk and informing public health decisions. Providing thought-provoking analysis of the implications for future health communication policy and practice, this book is primarily suitable for academics and graduate students interested in understanding how public health communication has changed. It may also be useful to health care professionals.

In the contemporary landscape of public administration, significant changes have taken place, driven by the need for efficiency, transparency and increased citizen involvement. Three key concepts encapsulate these changes: New Public Management, e-governance, and the ubiquitous role of social media. Each represents a transformative approach to governance, collectively shaping a more responsive and accountable public sector. This book explores the significant contributions of social media to democratic governance models, the realization of the principles of new public management and e-governance. It examines how social media facilitates transparency, improves accountability and citizen engagement, and encourages collaborative governance, thereby redefining traditional models of public administration. DOI: 10.58679/MM15993

This book explores societal vulnerabilities highlighted within cinema and develops an interpretive framework for understanding the depiction of societal responses to epidemic disease outbreaks across cinematic history. Drawing on a large database of twentieth- and twenty-first-century films depicting epidemics, the study looks into issues including trust, distrust, and mistrust; different epidemic experiences down the lines of expertise, gender, and wealth; and the difficulties in visualizing the invisible pathogen on screen. The authors argue that epidemics have long been presented in cinema as forming a point of cohesion for the communities portrayed, as individuals and groups “from below” represented as characters in these films find solidarity in battling a common enemy of elite institutions and authority figures. Throughout the book, a central question is also posed: “cohesion for whom?”, which sheds light on the fortunes of those characters that are excluded from these expressions of collective solidarity. This book is a valuable reference for scholars and students of film studies and visual studies as well as academic and general readers interested in topics of films and history, and disease and society. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

Communication about vaccination has become a public battleground. The global adoption of social media has increased the visibility and influence of groups that were previously considered fringe. With the goal of understanding vaccination-related misinformation’s online spread and ways of effectively countering it, this book explores its reception, resistance, and reproduction by a range of stakeholders around the globe. Chapters cover a rich array of topics, including vaccine misinformation’s history, its use as political propaganda, and its manipulation by both pro- and anti-vaccine groups. They apply a wide range of research methods, including historical literature and scoping reviews; advanced computational analysis, including machine learning; and reviews that incorporate the authors’ personal, professional, and practice-based experiences. Chapter authors include leading US and international scholars as well as practitioners of Communication, Computer Science, Health and Science Education, Political Communication, Public Health, Sociology, and other fields, making this book the most comprehensive and diverse collection of studies on vaccine misinformation—online and offline—currently available.

This book explores communication during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. Featuring the work of leading communication scholars from around the world, it offers insights and analyses into how individuals, organisations, communities, and nations have grappled with understanding and responding to the pandemic that has rocked the world. The book examines the role of journalists and news media in constructing meanings about the pandemic, with chapters focusing on public interest journalism, health workers and imagined audiences in COVID-19 news. It considers public health responses in different countries, with chapters examining community-driven approaches, communication strategies of governments and political leaders, public health advocacy, and pandemic inequalities. The role of digital media and technology is also unravelled, including social media sharing of misinformation and memetic humour, crowdsourcing initiatives, the use of data in modelling, tracking and tracing, and strategies for managing uncertainties created in a pandemic.

Pandemics are potentially very destructive phenomena, and for that reason, they both fascinate and frighten us. And because they are shot through with uncertainty, they often become sites of contestation and conflict. This book presents research on the 2009 pandemic and other public health crises in an attempt to describe and analyze the distinctive challenges that such diseases pose today. Thanks to vaccines, more reliable provision of medical services, more effective means of communication, and a more educated public, some argue we will not see a new Black Plague – or even Spanish Flu – in our time. Today we face new challenges, however, which can both enable diseases to reach pandemic scales and affect our ability to enact an appropriate response. Those include fragmentation of media, tribalization of “knowledge regimes,” the increasingly troubled status of scientific and political expertise, growing cross-continental mobility, as well as the globalization and commercialization of pandemic response systems. These distinctive complexities make the need to stage public action in response to pandemics and other public health crises a crucial problem, on which thousands of human lives hinge. This volume consists of a handful of social science and humanities studies of precisely such complexities, and thus offers a much-needed supplement to existing research on pandemics and pandemic response.

The past decade has witnessed a significant increase in the construction of health as a security issue by national governments and multilateral organizations. This book provides the first critical, feminist analysis of the flesh-and-blood impacts of the securitization of health on different bodies, while broadening the scope of what we understand as global health security. It looks at how feminist perspectives on health and security can lead to different questions about health and in/security, problematizing some of the ‘common sense’ assumptions that underlie much of the discourse in this area. It considers the norms, ideologies, and vested interests that frame specific ‘threats’ to health and policy responses, while exposing how the current governance of the global economy shapes new threats to health. Some chapters focus on conflict, war and complex emergencies, while others move from a ‘high political’ focus to the domain of subtler and often insidious structural violence, illuminating the impacts of hegemonic masculinities and the neoliberal governance of the global economy on health and life chances. Highlighting the critical intersections across health, gender and security, this book is an important contribution to scholarship on health and security, global health, public health and gender studies.

In Germanic and Nordic languages, the term for ‘public health’ literally translates to ‘people’s health’, for example Volksgesundheit in German, folkhälsa in Swedish and kansanterveys in Finnish. Covering a period stretching from the late nineteenth century to the present day, this book discusses how understandings and meanings of public health have developed in their political and social context, identifying ruptures and redefinitions in its conceptualisation. It analyses the multifaceted and interactive rhetorical play through which key concepts have been used as political tools, on the one hand, and shaped the understanding and operating environment of public health, on the other. Focusing on the blurred boundaries between the social and the medico-scientific realms, from social hygiene to population policy, Conceptualising Public Health explores the sometimes contradictory and paradoxical normative aims associated with the promotion of public health. Providing examples from Northern Europe and the Nordic countries, whilst situating them in a larger European and international context, it addresses questions such as: How have public health concepts been used in government and associated administrative practices from the early twentieth century up to the present? How has health citizenship been constructed over time? How has the collective entity of ‘the people’ been associated with and reflected in public health concepts? Drawn from a range of disciplinary backgrounds, the authors collected here each examine a particular way of understanding public health and assess how key actors or phenomena have challenged, altered or confirmed past and present meanings of the concept. Conceptualising Public Health is of interest to students and scholars of health and welfare state development from diverse backgrounds, including public health, sociology of health and illness, and social policy as well as medical, conceptual and intellectual history.

To date, geography has not yet carved out a disciplinary niche within the diffuse domain that constitutes global health. However, the compulsion to do and understand global health emerges largely from contexts that geography has long engaged with: urbanisation, globalisation, political economy, risk, vulnerability, lifestyles, geopolitics, culture, governance, development and the environment. Moreover, global health brings with it an innate, powerful and politicising spatial logic that is only now starting to emerge as an object of enquiry. This book aims to draw attention to and showcase the wealth of existing and emergent geographical contributions to what has recently been termed ‘critical global health studies’. Geographical perspectives, this collection argues, are essential to bringing new and critical perspectives to bear on the inherent complexities and interconnectedness of global health problems and purported solutions. Thus, rather than rehearsing the frequent critique that global health is more a ‘set of problems’ than a coherent disciplinary approach to ameliorating the health of all and redressing global bio-inequalities; this collection seeks to explore what these problems might represent and the geographical imaginaries inherent in their constitution. This unique volume of geographical writings on global health not only deepens social scientific engagements with health itself, but in so doing, brings forth a series of new conceptual, methodological and empirical contributions to social scientific, multidisciplinary scholarship.