This book examines the relationship between media and medicine, considering the fundamental role of news coverage in constructing wider cultural understandings of health and disease. The authors advance the notion of 'biomediatization' and demonstrate how health knowledge is co-produced through connections between dispersed sites and forms of expertise. The chapters offer an innovative combination of media content analysis and ethnographic data on the production and circulation of health news, drawing on work with journalists, clinicians, health officials, medical researchers, marketers, and audiences. The volume provides students and scholars with unique insight into the significance and complexity of what health news does and how it is created.
"Briggs and Hallin have crafted a well-written and engaging text that provides a useful framework for studying health and disease in the 21st century. This book has the potential to inspire anthropologists to take more seriously the role of media in the production and circulation of medical and lay knowledge about health and disease. Biomediatization is an especially valuable contribution to medical anthropology, and the concept could easily take a place alongside and re-shape understandings of many popular conceptual frameworks in medical anthropology such as biomedicalization, biocommunicability, embodiment, performativity/enactment, and pharmaceuticalization."
- William J. Robertson, Anthropology Book Forum (American Anthropological Association)
- William J. Robertson, Anthropology Book Forum (American Anthropological Association)
"Briggs and Hallin have crafted a well-written and engaging text that provides a useful framework for studying health and disease in the 21st century. This book has the potential to inspire anthropologists to take more seriously the role of media in the production and circulation of medical and lay knowledge about health and disease. Biomediatization is an especially valuable contribution to medical anthropology, and the concept could easily take a place alongside and re-shape understandings of many popular conceptual frameworks in medical anthropology such as biomedicalization, biocommunicability, embodiment, performativity/enactment, and pharmaceuticalization."
- William J. Robertson, Anthropology Book Forum (American Anthropological Association)
- William J. Robertson, Anthropology Book Forum (American Anthropological Association)