Martin French
Biographic Data
| ID | 177450 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Martin French |
| GIVEN NAMES | Martin |
| FAMILY NAME | French |
| SIGNATURE | FRENCH M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Concordia University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8724-5139 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 22 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 94 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 22 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2006 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
‘It's Primarily Around Their Viral Load’
In Ontario, Canada, public health authorities can issue and enforce orders to people living with HIV (PLWH). However, how public health practitioners determine when someone's behaviours constitute ‘significant’ risk remains underexplored. We drew on assemblage theory to examine how HIV risk is co‐constituted through the interplay among biomedical technologies, institutional practices, legal frameworks and social discourses. We conducted 18 semi‐s…
Social representations of pleasure in gambling among young adults
Pleasure is one of the main reasons many young adults are interested in gambling. While several studies have highlighted the relationship between gambling and pleasure and how it is most related to motivation to gamble, very few have explored the meaning of pleasure in the gambler’s experience. The purpose of this paper is to understand the meaning of pleasure in the relationship between young adults and gambling by studying the social representa…
Criminal Code reform of HIV non-disclosure is urgently needed
Speculating on Steam
The rise of platforms as the premier model of videogame distribution has led to a number of changes in the business models of producers and distributors. Consumers are constantly hailed by games platforms through freemium business models that offer cosmetic items contained in loot boxes or recurring subscriptions. Thus far, game studies and consumer studies have been unable to account for the totality of how these new and dynamic platforms circum…
Productive play
Regulatory approaches to games are organized by boundaries between game/not-game, game/gambling game, skilled/unskilled play, consumption/production. Perhaps more importantly, moral justifications for regulating gambling (and condemning digital games) are rooted in the idea that they consume our time and wages but give little in return. This article uses two case studies to show how these boundaries and justifications are now perforated and recon…
A Governmentality of Online Gambling
This article examines Canada’s first internet gambling website blocking scheme, which was enacted in Quebec as part of the implementation of the province’s 2015 budget. Using qualitative research methods, the article illustrates the complexities of regulating online gambling. Influenced by critical sociological and anthropological studies of gambling, and taking a socio-legal, governmentality perspective, it shows how socio-legal studies can illu…
Corporate contact tracing as a pandemic response
Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, a steady stream of propositions from tech giants and start-ups alike has furnished us with the idea that GPS- or Bluetooth-enabled contact tracing apps are a vital part of the pandemic response. This commentary considers these apps as ‘corporate contact tracing’, emphasizing the private-sector role that such developments imply. We first discuss corporate contact tracing’s potential to de-center the power …
Dis-ease Surveillance
We are currently in the midst of a global pandemic with the spread of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19). While we do not know how this situation will unfold or resolve, we do have insight into how it fits within existing patterns and relations, particularly those pertaining to sociocultural constructions of (in)security, vulnerability, and risk. We can see evidence of surveillance dynamics at play with how bodies and pathogens are being measure…
Betting on Dota 2’s Battle Pass
The transformation of games with the advent of platformized distribution systems continues to produce new and agile forms of consumption and exploitation. Valve Corporation’s DOTA 2 is a key example of a gaming space that is constantly atomized and rebuilt with the aim of optimizing player participation. This participatory form is ever-more gamblified and framed by systems designed to habituate players to a new form of consumption. This article e…
"A touch of luck and a "real taste of Vegas
In recent years, there has been an explosion of "experiential design" in casinos, driven in part by research suggesting that curating gambling sensescapes can lure patrons to spend more time – and money – inside the casino. Building on the promise of existing casino ethnographies, this paper argues that a sensory ethnographic approach to the study of gambling environments can offer valuable insight into the experiential design and mood management…
Covid-19, public health, and the politics of prevention
If the global HIV pandemic and more localised outbreaks of SARS, Ebola and the Zika virus, among others, did not convince us that infectious diseases have been far from conquered, then COVID-19 must certainly have done so. In the past few months, questions about the global coronavirus pandemic – its cause, distribution, health and social impacts, and how best to limit its reach through public health measures – have re-centred emerging infectious …
The HIV self-testing debate
Surveillance and Embodiment
This article provides an introduction to a special issue of Body & Society that explores the surveillance--embodiment nexus. It accentuates both the prevalence and consequence of bodies being increasingly converted into 'objects of information' by surveillance technologies and systems. We begin by regarding the normalcy of body monitoring in contemporary life, illustrating how a plurality of biometric scanners operate to intermediate the physical…
Counselling anomie
HIV criminalisation is a term that describes the criminal prosecution of persons in instances of HIV transmission, exposure and so-called non-disclosure of their HIV serostatus. In the United States (US), there have been over 500 reported instances of HIV criminalisation. Over the past decade, several negative consequences of HIV criminalisation have been identified, including its capacity to increase stigma and social injustice. In addition, sch…
Gaps in the gaze
Many works that may be situated within the interdisciplinary field of Surveillance Studies have described dangerous potentialities associated with the pervasive, IT-mediated merger of once discrete data sets. In effect, these works cautioned about the rise of “big data” before it was named as such. Even so, they share an uncomfortable consonance with euphoric claims about the revolutionary transformation portended by big data. Situating both euph…
Health’ surveillance
Public health intelligence and the detection of potential pandemics
This article considers contemporary developments in public health intelligence (PHI), especially their focus on health events of pandemic potential. It argues that the sociological study of PHI can yield important insights for the sociology of pandemics. PHI aims to detect health events as (or evenbefore) they unfold. Whilst its apparatuses envelope traditional public health activities, such as epidemiological surveillance, they increasingly exte…
"Leveraging the "living laboratory
Woven of War-Time Fabrics
This article considers the imbrication of war-time logics with the ideational and institutional development of public health surveillance. It suggests that, as the Cold-War–era gave way to the ‘age of globalization’, public health discourse became less concerned with ideological enemies, and more concerned with ontological enemies. The discourse of emerging infectious disease exemplifies this preoccupation and illustrates how public health survei…
Wald's Contagious
The word contagion" Priscilla Wald notes, "means literally 'to touch together', and one of its earliest usages in the fourteenth century referred to the circulation of ideas and attitudes" (12, emphasis original). This definition gives us the flavour of Wald's analytic approach to the "outbreak narrative" (2), which is the infectious touching together of explanatory tropes. This narrative has (re)emerged in successive projects that have attempted…
In the Shadow of Canada’s Camps
States engaged in the war on terror have pursued war-time domestic security policies, as reflected by special anti-terror legislation enacted, for instance, in Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom. Taking Canada as a case study, this article argues that the pursuit of these policies exacerbates existent racial fissures in the social body. Using elements of Giorgio Agamben’s theory of the state of exception as an analytical framework,…
Cultural Sutures
Dis-ease Surveillance
We are currently in the midst of a global pandemic with the spread of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19). While we do not know how this situation will unfold or resolve, we do have insight into how it fits within existing patterns and relations, particularly those pertaining to sociocultural constructions of (in)security, vulnerability, and risk. We can see evidence of surveillance dynamics at play with how bodies and pathogens are being measure…
Woven of War-Time Fabrics
This article considers the imbrication of war-time logics with the ideational and institutional development of public health surveillance. It suggests that, as the Cold-War–era gave way to the ‘age of globalization’, public health discourse became less concerned with ideological enemies, and more concerned with ontological enemies. The discourse of emerging infectious disease exemplifies this preoccupation and illustrates how public health survei…
Betting on Dota 2’s Battle Pass
The transformation of games with the advent of platformized distribution systems continues to produce new and agile forms of consumption and exploitation. Valve Corporation’s DOTA 2 is a key example of a gaming space that is constantly atomized and rebuilt with the aim of optimizing player participation. This participatory form is ever-more gamblified and framed by systems designed to habituate players to a new form of consumption. This article e…
Public health intelligence and the detection of potential pandemics
This article considers contemporary developments in public health intelligence (PHI), especially their focus on health events of pandemic potential. It argues that the sociological study of PHI can yield important insights for the sociology of pandemics. PHI aims to detect health events as (or evenbefore) they unfold. Whilst its apparatuses envelope traditional public health activities, such as epidemiological surveillance, they increasingly exte…
In the Shadow of Canada’s Camps
States engaged in the war on terror have pursued war-time domestic security policies, as reflected by special anti-terror legislation enacted, for instance, in Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom. Taking Canada as a case study, this article argues that the pursuit of these policies exacerbates existent racial fissures in the social body. Using elements of Giorgio Agamben’s theory of the state of exception as an analytical framework,…
Surveillance and Embodiment
This article provides an introduction to a special issue of Body & Society that explores the surveillance--embodiment nexus. It accentuates both the prevalence and consequence of bodies being increasingly converted into 'objects of information' by surveillance technologies and systems. We begin by regarding the normalcy of body monitoring in contemporary life, illustrating how a plurality of biometric scanners operate to intermediate the physical…
Gaps in the gaze
Many works that may be situated within the interdisciplinary field of Surveillance Studies have described dangerous potentialities associated with the pervasive, IT-mediated merger of once discrete data sets. In effect, these works cautioned about the rise of “big data” before it was named as such. Even so, they share an uncomfortable consonance with euphoric claims about the revolutionary transformation portended by big data. Situating both euph…
"Leveraging the "living laboratory
"A touch of luck and a "real taste of Vegas
In recent years, there has been an explosion of "experiential design" in casinos, driven in part by research suggesting that curating gambling sensescapes can lure patrons to spend more time – and money – inside the casino. Building on the promise of existing casino ethnographies, this paper argues that a sensory ethnographic approach to the study of gambling environments can offer valuable insight into the experiential design and mood management…
Criminal Code reform of HIV non-disclosure is urgently needed
Speculating on Steam
The rise of platforms as the premier model of videogame distribution has led to a number of changes in the business models of producers and distributors. Consumers are constantly hailed by games platforms through freemium business models that offer cosmetic items contained in loot boxes or recurring subscriptions. Thus far, game studies and consumer studies have been unable to account for the totality of how these new and dynamic platforms circum…
Productive play
Regulatory approaches to games are organized by boundaries between game/not-game, game/gambling game, skilled/unskilled play, consumption/production. Perhaps more importantly, moral justifications for regulating gambling (and condemning digital games) are rooted in the idea that they consume our time and wages but give little in return. This article uses two case studies to show how these boundaries and justifications are now perforated and recon…
Covid-19, public health, and the politics of prevention
If the global HIV pandemic and more localised outbreaks of SARS, Ebola and the Zika virus, among others, did not convince us that infectious diseases have been far from conquered, then COVID-19 must certainly have done so. In the past few months, questions about the global coronavirus pandemic – its cause, distribution, health and social impacts, and how best to limit its reach through public health measures – have re-centred emerging infectious …
Cultural Sutures
In the Shadow of Canada’s Camps
States engaged in the war on terror have pursued war-time domestic security policies, as reflected by special anti-terror legislation enacted, for instance, in Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom. Taking Canada as a case study, this article argues that the pursuit of these policies exacerbates existent racial fissures in the social body. Using elements of Giorgio Agamben’s theory of the state of exception as an analytical framework,…
Woven of War-Time Fabrics
This article considers the imbrication of war-time logics with the ideational and institutional development of public health surveillance. It suggests that, as the Cold-War–era gave way to the ‘age of globalization’, public health discourse became less concerned with ideological enemies, and more concerned with ontological enemies. The discourse of emerging infectious disease exemplifies this preoccupation and illustrates how public health survei…
Wald's Contagious
The word contagion" Priscilla Wald notes, "means literally 'to touch together', and one of its earliest usages in the fourteenth century referred to the circulation of ideas and attitudes" (12, emphasis original). This definition gives us the flavour of Wald's analytic approach to the "outbreak narrative" (2), which is the infectious touching together of explanatory tropes. This narrative has (re)emerged in successive projects that have attempted…
"Leveraging the "living laboratory
Health’ surveillance
Public health intelligence and the detection of potential pandemics
This article considers contemporary developments in public health intelligence (PHI), especially their focus on health events of pandemic potential. It argues that the sociological study of PHI can yield important insights for the sociology of pandemics. PHI aims to detect health events as (or evenbefore) they unfold. Whilst its apparatuses envelope traditional public health activities, such as epidemiological surveillance, they increasingly exte…
Gaps in the gaze
Many works that may be situated within the interdisciplinary field of Surveillance Studies have described dangerous potentialities associated with the pervasive, IT-mediated merger of once discrete data sets. In effect, these works cautioned about the rise of “big data” before it was named as such. Even so, they share an uncomfortable consonance with euphoric claims about the revolutionary transformation portended by big data. Situating both euph…
Counselling anomie
HIV criminalisation is a term that describes the criminal prosecution of persons in instances of HIV transmission, exposure and so-called non-disclosure of their HIV serostatus. In the United States (US), there have been over 500 reported instances of HIV criminalisation. Over the past decade, several negative consequences of HIV criminalisation have been identified, including its capacity to increase stigma and social injustice. In addition, sch…
Surveillance and Embodiment
This article provides an introduction to a special issue of Body & Society that explores the surveillance--embodiment nexus. It accentuates both the prevalence and consequence of bodies being increasingly converted into 'objects of information' by surveillance technologies and systems. We begin by regarding the normalcy of body monitoring in contemporary life, illustrating how a plurality of biometric scanners operate to intermediate the physical…
The HIV self-testing debate
Corporate contact tracing as a pandemic response
Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, a steady stream of propositions from tech giants and start-ups alike has furnished us with the idea that GPS- or Bluetooth-enabled contact tracing apps are a vital part of the pandemic response. This commentary considers these apps as ‘corporate contact tracing’, emphasizing the private-sector role that such developments imply. We first discuss corporate contact tracing’s potential to de-center the power …
Dis-ease Surveillance
We are currently in the midst of a global pandemic with the spread of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19). While we do not know how this situation will unfold or resolve, we do have insight into how it fits within existing patterns and relations, particularly those pertaining to sociocultural constructions of (in)security, vulnerability, and risk. We can see evidence of surveillance dynamics at play with how bodies and pathogens are being measure…
Betting on Dota 2’s Battle Pass
The transformation of games with the advent of platformized distribution systems continues to produce new and agile forms of consumption and exploitation. Valve Corporation’s DOTA 2 is a key example of a gaming space that is constantly atomized and rebuilt with the aim of optimizing player participation. This participatory form is ever-more gamblified and framed by systems designed to habituate players to a new form of consumption. This article e…
"A touch of luck and a "real taste of Vegas
In recent years, there has been an explosion of "experiential design" in casinos, driven in part by research suggesting that curating gambling sensescapes can lure patrons to spend more time – and money – inside the casino. Building on the promise of existing casino ethnographies, this paper argues that a sensory ethnographic approach to the study of gambling environments can offer valuable insight into the experiential design and mood management…
Covid-19, public health, and the politics of prevention
If the global HIV pandemic and more localised outbreaks of SARS, Ebola and the Zika virus, among others, did not convince us that infectious diseases have been far from conquered, then COVID-19 must certainly have done so. In the past few months, questions about the global coronavirus pandemic – its cause, distribution, health and social impacts, and how best to limit its reach through public health measures – have re-centred emerging infectious …
Speculating on Steam
The rise of platforms as the premier model of videogame distribution has led to a number of changes in the business models of producers and distributors. Consumers are constantly hailed by games platforms through freemium business models that offer cosmetic items contained in loot boxes or recurring subscriptions. Thus far, game studies and consumer studies have been unable to account for the totality of how these new and dynamic platforms circum…
Productive play
Regulatory approaches to games are organized by boundaries between game/not-game, game/gambling game, skilled/unskilled play, consumption/production. Perhaps more importantly, moral justifications for regulating gambling (and condemning digital games) are rooted in the idea that they consume our time and wages but give little in return. This article uses two case studies to show how these boundaries and justifications are now perforated and recon…
A Governmentality of Online Gambling
This article examines Canada’s first internet gambling website blocking scheme, which was enacted in Quebec as part of the implementation of the province’s 2015 budget. Using qualitative research methods, the article illustrates the complexities of regulating online gambling. Influenced by critical sociological and anthropological studies of gambling, and taking a socio-legal, governmentality perspective, it shows how socio-legal studies can illu…
Criminal Code reform of HIV non-disclosure is urgently needed
Social representations of pleasure in gambling among young adults
Pleasure is one of the main reasons many young adults are interested in gambling. While several studies have highlighted the relationship between gambling and pleasure and how it is most related to motivation to gamble, very few have explored the meaning of pleasure in the gambler’s experience. The purpose of this paper is to understand the meaning of pleasure in the relationship between young adults and gambling by studying the social representa…
‘It's Primarily Around Their Viral Load’
In Ontario, Canada, public health authorities can issue and enforce orders to people living with HIV (PLWH). However, how public health practitioners determine when someone's behaviours constitute ‘significant’ risk remains underexplored. We drew on assemblage theory to examine how HIV risk is co‐constituted through the interplay among biomedical technologies, institutional practices, legal frameworks and social discourses. We conducted 18 semi‐s…
Sociology (16 works) · Political science (14 works) · Medicine (10 works) · Law (9 works) · Law (8 works) · Economics (7 works) · Business (6 works) · Computer Science (6 works) · Politics (6 works) · Public health (6 works)