July 2012 on ‘This Sociological Life’

Part of this month was devoted to writing my three-part series on digital sociology. The first two of these posts: ‘Digital sociology 1: what is it?’ and ‘Digital sociology 2: professional digital practice‘ were republished on the LSE Impact of the Social Sciences blog. I have been working on collecting these posts, along with some other writings on using social media in academia, into a document that I will publish electronically next month, entitled Digital Sociology: An Introduction (watch this space for news on when the document will become available).

I also published two Storify presentations this month. One looked at the homage to British medicine and the NHS in the Olympics Opening Ceremony (including reactions on social media) (it can be viewed here). The other Storify presentation summarised the proceedings of a forum on the Social Determinants of Health that I helped to organise at the University of Sydney (see it here).

My piece on disgust in anti-obesity campaigns appeared in The Conversation. I am continuing to write about how disgust is used in public health campaigns for a journal article. I have been collecting examples of public health campaign materials on a Pinterest board as part of this research: the collection can be seen here.

This month I also finally completed the second revised edition of my book Risk (first published by Routledge in 1999) and sent it off to the publishers. One of my blog posts this month drew on one of the aspects I cover in the book: risk, concepts of space and place and the Other.

My article ‘M-health and health promotion: the digital cyborg and surveillance society’ was published in Social Theory & Health this month (see here for details).

June 2012 highlights on ‘This Sociological Life’

Last month was the first full month in the life of this blog, and it was a busy one. One of the most popular posts of the month looked at the debate provoked by the obesity sceptics who challenge the orthodox medical view that (non-extreme) obesity is detrimental to health. Many interesting opinions were posted in response to the post, including clinicians and health promotion academics working in obesity treatment and prevention and activists advocating for the Health at Every Size Approach, as well as my own comments providing details about other work in this area and in fat studies. There were quite a few relevant sources cited to back up commentators’ arguments, so these comments would be a good place to look for those interested in the debate between anti-obesity exponents and obesity sceptics.

Other posts published last month looked at topics such as how women engage in voluntary risk-taking (‘edgework’) and how this differs from men’s edgework; pregnancy and loss of control of the body/self; the concept of the ‘good mother’ in relation to the ‘fat child’; the Australian government’s controversial introduction of a mental health check for three-year-old children; the new mobile device technologies and how they are being used for health promotion; and the concepts of the ‘milkmother’ and the ‘Yummy Mummy’ in contemporary understandings and experiences of motherhood.

Another popular post in June looked at how sociologists and other social scientists can use the social media platform Pinterest as part of their research and teaching. This post was republished on the LSE Impact of the Social Sciences website. I noted in the post that I have made my own Pinterest boards on my current research interests. They include ‘Medicine as Culture’, ‘Fat Culture’, ‘The Sociology of Infancy’, ‘The Sociology of the Preborn’, ‘M-health and the Digital Cyborg’ and ‘Public Health Campaigns’ (you can view the boards here). I was also interviewed for The Australian newspaper’s Higher Education section about using Pinterest in academic work.

In June I also wrote a guest blog for ‘Croakey’, the health section of the ‘Crikey’ discussion website on making an app as an experiment to see how easy being an ‘app developer’ is (). To view or download the app itself (which explains over 25 key concepts in medical sociology) go here. I continue to be fascinated by the capabilities of social media for academic work and have been busy experimenting with Twitter (@DALupton), Delicious and Storify.

Meanwhile, in other academic writing my article ‘”Precious cargo”: foetal subjects, risk and reproductive citizenship’ was published in Critical Public Health. Last month I continued work on the revisions for the second edition my book Risk, originally published by Routledge in 1999, and plan to submit the final manuscript to the publishers at the end of July. I am bringing the book up to date by including, among many other issues, discussions of Ulrich Beck’s and Anthony Giddens’ latest writings on risk and new governmentality approaches on ‘prudential risk’ in the context of the catastrophic events that have occurred since the turn of this century and which have resulted in different ways of understanding and dealing with risk.