One of the current era’s most pressing political, economic and public health issues is food security and safety. Recent outbreaks of food-borne illness in Canada have brought this home in a powerful and highly resonant way, yet there is much more to the issue than the increased potential for infection and disease. Costs are also [...]
Posts Tagged as ‘Risk Society’
September 23, 2008
Disease Surveillance 2.0
In the first meeting of my grad seminar on communication and public health we discussed the contributions of some leading social theorists (Michel Foucault, Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens), particularly their theories of governmentality (Foucault), risk (Beck, Giddens) and reflexivity (also Beck, Giddens).
A recent story in Wired magazine illustrates some of these ideas well. The piece [...]
September 19, 2008
Public Health Gets its Groove On
A story published in yesterday’s Washington Post reports that for the “global generation,” public health is a “hot field” of research. Although this demographic isn’t defined, let’s assume that it comprises primarily university and college-educated youth with a cosmopolitan sensibility. Echoing some of the conceptual underpinnings of Ulrich Beck’s second modernity thesis, the notion that the processes of [...]
