Niamh Stephenson
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 235746 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Niamh Stephenson |
| PRENOMES | Niamh |
| SOBRENOME | Stephenson |
| ASSINATURA | STEPHENSON N |
| AFILIAÇÕES | UNSW Sydney |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8105-1931 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 43 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 183 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 43 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2001 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2025 |
| ÍNDICE H | 8 |
The 'Informed Matter' of Gay and Bisexual Men's (Potential) Use of HIV Antiretrovirals to Prevent Covid-19
In 2020, there were reports that HIV antiretrovirals, specifically the combination tenofovir disoproxil fumarate and emtricitabine (TDF/FTC), had therapeutic potential for COVID-19. In the context of scant empirical evidence at the time to confirm such an effect, we sought to understand the ways that gay and bisexual men (GBM) made sense of-and embodied-information about HIV antiretrovirals in relation to preventing and/or treating COVID-19. We c…
Techno-legal expertise and the datafication of the state
As governments around the world become increasingly datafied, debates are emerging about the best ways to attend to the complex socio-political implications of big data and the datafication of the state. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with senior executives and data experts within Australian government agencies, high-level privacy experts, and other experts in public sector data integration, this article examines how a sociotechnical imagi…
Pill testing policy
Newspaper coverage of childhood immunisation in Australia
Public health efforts to lift childhood vaccination rates can be supported or undermined by media representations of parents. Polarising representations neglect the large range of ‘middle-ground’ positions people occupy, potentially alienating parents. In recent years, Australian public health actors have tried to better engage journalists to avoid this. As these efforts have unfolded, the main national immunisation policy lever has become more p…
Simply providing information”
Obstetric ultrasound is key to opposing ways of valuing foetuses, that is, both to the ascription of foetal personhood and to foetal selection and termination of pregnancy. Whilst ultrasound images are increasingly common within the public sphere there has been relatively little public discussion of its role in identifying actual or potential foetal anomaly and the consequences of this. This paper examines how professionals working with obstetric…
Socialising the Biomedical Turn in HIV Prevention
This book concerns HIV prevention. In it the authors argue that until the world focuses its attention on the social issues carried and revealed by AIDS, it is unlikely that HIV transmission will be eradicated or even significantly reduced. This book’s argument is that at least until such time as biomedicine develops an effective prophylactic vaccine and a cure for HIV, the world must rely on the everyday responses of people and communities to com…
Socialising the Biomedical Turn in HIV Prevention
Ambiguous Encounters, Uncertain Foetuses
We examine pregnant women's experiences with routinised obstetric ultrasound as entailed in their antenatal care during planned pregnancies. This paper highlights the ambiguity of ultrasound technology in the constitution of maternal-foetal connections. Our analysis focusses on Australian women's experiences of the ontological, aesthetic and epistemological ambiguities afforded by ultrasound. We argue that these ambiguities offer possibilities fo…
Understanding pandemic influenza behaviour
Pandemic influenza represents an ongoing public health threat. Understanding the associated behavioural domain is vital for future intervention development. Cross-sectional qualitative research employing purposive sampling employed a combination of one-to-one semi-structured interviews ( n = 57) and focus groups ( n = 59). Data were analysed using (1) inductive thematic analysis and (2) theoretical thematic analysis focusing upon resonance with p…
Immunity, Biopolitics and Pandemics
This article examines discourse on immunity in general public engagements with pandemic influenza in light of critical theory on immuno-politics and bodily integrity. Interview and focus group discussions on influenza with members of the general public reveal that, despite endorsement of government advice on how to avoid infection, influenza is seen as, ultimately, unavoidable. In place of prevention, members of the general public speak of immuni…
Speculating on health
Where modern public health developed techniques to calculate probability, potentiality, risk and uncertainty, contemporary finance introduces instruments that redeploy these. This article traces possibilities for interrogating the connection between health and financialisation as it is arising in one particular example - the health impact bond. It locates the development of this very recent financial innovation in an account of public health's ro…
‘Fuzzy’ virus
Influenza viruses are radically uncertain, leading to scientific and procedural challenges for diagnosis and surveillance and lending influenza symptoms a high degree of indeterminacy. In time of pandemic influenza, however, members of the general public are asked to enact non-pharmaceutical infection control measures such as hygiene and social distancing. Drawing on the concepts of manufactured risk and ontological insecurity, we use data from i…
Beyond resistance
Overall, respondents were engaged with public health advice regarding pandemic influenza, indicating that the idea of public resistance has limited explanatory power. Public communications are endorsed, but challenges persist. Individualistic approaches to pandemic risk inhibit acting for the benefit of others and may deepen divisions in the community according to health status. Public communications on pandemics are mediated by gender norms that…
Australia’s pandemic influenza ‘Protect’ phase
© 2014 Taylor & Francis. Recent sociological analyses of contemporary emergency planning foreground a potential break between preparedness plans animated by the spectre of an imaginary future catastrophe and classical public health efforts that are anchored in close knowledge of populations and efforts to prevent the transmission of disease. Whilst scholarly analysis to date suggests that the distinct rationales of public health governance underp…
Sidestepping questions of legitimacy
Empirical studies of community participation in health services commonly tie effectiveness to the perceived legitimacy of community representatives among health staff. This article examines the underlying assumption that legitimacy is the major pathway to influence for community representatives. It takes a different vantage point from previous research in its examination of data (primarily through 34 in-depth interviews, observation and recording…
Biography, pandemic time and risk
During the 2009 H1N1 pandemic, it was identified that women in the third trimester of pregnancy were particularly at risk of serious respiratory distress. At-risk women were advised to seek vaccination, avoid contact with anyone unwell, maintain hygiene routines and stop smoking. We examine this situation of emergent and intense risk produced at the intersection of individual biography and the historical event of a public health emergency. We exa…
We Became Sceptics
In this article, we examine the apparent resistance of publics to messages regarding pandemic influenza. The 2009 H1N1 pandemic was addressed through media: governments used print, broadcast, and digital media to advise publics to enact hygiene practices and comply with social isolation; news media took up the pandemic as a lead story. Publics, however, rated the pandemic as not serious, even before it was widely known that it was mild for most. …
We had to do what we thought was right at the time
For a few weeks in 2009 it was not certain whether the world faced a lethal influenza pandemic. As it turned out, the H1N1 pandemic was less severe than anticipated, though the infection did affect groups not usually susceptible to influenza. The deep uncertainties of this pandemic moment were associated with immense practical, scientific and political challenges for public health agencies around the world. We examine these challenges by drawing …
Between Individual Agency and Structure in HIV Prevention
When HIV prevention targets risk and vulnerability, it focuses on individual agency and social structures, ignoring the centrality of community in effective HIV prevention. The neoliberal concept of risk assumes individuals are rational agents who act on information provided to them regarding HIV transmission. This individualistic framework does not recognize the communities in which people act and connect. The concept of vulnerability on the oth…
Mobilising “vulnerability” in the public health response to pandemic influenza
This Is Class War from Above and They Are Winning It
What is to be done in conditions where capitalo-normativity is so pervasive? Escape Routes was written as an attempt to think the possibility of politics from below against this ubiquitous capitalist spell over life. The book does not look for social transformation in existing organized forms of resistance. It tries to think how transformative occasions emerge that allow those who have no part to enter and change the conditions of existence altog…
Beyond the Distinction Between Biomedical and Social Dimensions of HIV Prevention Through the Lens of a Social Public Health
Developing effective HIV prevention requires that we move beyond the historical but problematic distinction between biomedical and social dimensions of HIV. The current claim that prevention has failed has led to a strong interest in the role of treatment as HIV prevention; however, the turn to “biomedical prevention,” “test and treat,” and “combination prevention” instances pervasive confusions about prevention. These confusions arise from a fai…
Kippax and Stephenson Respond
We are pleased that Aral and Blanchard concur that public health needs to move beyond the distinction between biomedical and social dimensions of HIV prevention and resist the increasing biomedicalization of HIV prevention. This move is particularly important in the current context in which HIV prevention is increasingly linked to treatment. Effective HIV prevention, including “treatment as prevention,” requires that people change their social pr…
Exit from the Regime of Life Control
In its early 20th century materialisation, risk was calculable and these calculations were primarily based on assessments of the past. By the end of the century, risk was increasingly considered to be fundamentally incalculable and it has become the object of the work of anticipation. This paper elucidates this shift by examining three regimes of life control. The Life/Culture System pervades early 20th century cultural and political thinking: wo…
A Social Public Health
The author discusses social relations and the prevention of infectious disease. He comments on a study from 1966 that examined how doctors started prescribing drugs and found that the relationship between doctors had the greatest influence on prescribing habits. He mentions the role of social connections that are involved in infectious disease transmission. He talks about differences between social public health and new public health concerning i…
Beyond the Distinction Between Biomedical and Social Dimensions of HIV Prevention Through the Lens of a Social Public Health
Developing effective HIV prevention requires that we move beyond the historical but problematic distinction between biomedical and social dimensions of HIV. The current claim that prevention has failed has led to a strong interest in the role of treatment as HIV prevention; however, the turn to “biomedical prevention,” “test and treat,” and “combination prevention” instances pervasive confusions about prevention. These confusions arise from a fai…
Governing the Future
Increasingly, governmental responses to incalculable, but high-consequence, threats to life and security are framed by what has been described as the 'precautionary principle' (Ewald), 'preparedness' (Collier, Lakoff & Rabinow) or 'pre-emption' (Derrida). This article redescribes features common to these characterizations as the paradigm of prudence and examines how this approach to risk management is playing out in the context of fears that feat…
Between Individual Agency and Structure in HIV Prevention
When HIV prevention targets risk and vulnerability, it focuses on individual agency and social structures, ignoring the centrality of community in effective HIV prevention. The neoliberal concept of risk assumes individuals are rational agents who act on information provided to them regarding HIV transmission. This individualistic framework does not recognize the communities in which people act and connect. The concept of vulnerability on the oth…
Securitising health
This paper analyses contemporary Australian newspaper coverage of the threat of pandemic influenza in humans, specifically in the light of recent transformations in biomedical and public health understandings of infectious disease as continuously emerging. Our analysis suggests that the spectre of pandemic influenza is characterised, in newspaper accounts, as invoking a specific form of nation building. The Australian nation is depicted as succes…
Speculating on health
Where modern public health developed techniques to calculate probability, potentiality, risk and uncertainty, contemporary finance introduces instruments that redeploy these. This article traces possibilities for interrogating the connection between health and financialisation as it is arising in one particular example - the health impact bond. It locates the development of this very recent financial innovation in an account of public health's ro…
Compliant, complacent or panicked? Investigating the problematisation of the Australian general public in pandemic influenza control
Living history, undoing linearity
If we accept that social research is not simply a matter of representation, but involves actively intervening in and constructing our current social and political conditions, we are then presented with a set of problems about representation and intervention. The methodology, memory‐work, is introduced here as one specifically developed for the purposes of undertaking politically engaged social research. In this paper, I describe the rationale and…
We Became Sceptics
In this article, we examine the apparent resistance of publics to messages regarding pandemic influenza. The 2009 H1N1 pandemic was addressed through media: governments used print, broadcast, and digital media to advise publics to enact hygiene practices and comply with social isolation; news media took up the pandemic as a lead story. Publics, however, rated the pandemic as not serious, even before it was widely known that it was mild for most. …
We had to do what we thought was right at the time
For a few weeks in 2009 it was not certain whether the world faced a lethal influenza pandemic. As it turned out, the H1N1 pandemic was less severe than anticipated, though the infection did affect groups not usually susceptible to influenza. The deep uncertainties of this pandemic moment were associated with immense practical, scientific and political challenges for public health agencies around the world. We examine these challenges by drawing …
Mobilising “vulnerability” in the public health response to pandemic influenza
Immunity, Biopolitics and Pandemics
This article examines discourse on immunity in general public engagements with pandemic influenza in light of critical theory on immuno-politics and bodily integrity. Interview and focus group discussions on influenza with members of the general public reveal that, despite endorsement of government advice on how to avoid infection, influenza is seen as, ultimately, unavoidable. In place of prevention, members of the general public speak of immuni…
Risk, insurance, preparedness and the disappearance of the population
The Australian response to the threat of pandemic influenza is part of a broader shift in public health and governance. This shift in approach to risk – from insurance to preparedness – has been triggered by the emergence of incalculable, global, catastrophic risks. Familiar, insurance-driven approaches to governing risk work by intervening at the level of the population. However, incalculable risks of the scale posed by pandemic influenza exceed…
Living with HIV and negotiating psychological discourse
Since the introduction of antiretroviral drug treatments, there has been increased interest in the psychological aspects of living with HIV and a growth of related research and therapeutic literature. While there has been concern about the 'remedicalization' of HIV, there is apparently less concern about its 'psychologization'. This article considers how the expansion of psychological discourse about HIV impacts on the lives of HIV-positive peopl…
This Is Class War from Above and They Are Winning It
What is to be done in conditions where capitalo-normativity is so pervasive? Escape Routes was written as an attempt to think the possibility of politics from below against this ubiquitous capitalist spell over life. The book does not look for social transformation in existing organized forms of resistance. It tries to think how transformative occasions emerge that allow those who have no part to enter and change the conditions of existence altog…
Simply providing information”
Obstetric ultrasound is key to opposing ways of valuing foetuses, that is, both to the ascription of foetal personhood and to foetal selection and termination of pregnancy. Whilst ultrasound images are increasingly common within the public sphere there has been relatively little public discussion of its role in identifying actual or potential foetal anomaly and the consequences of this. This paper examines how professionals working with obstetric…
Interrupting Neo-liberal Subjectivities
Ambiguous Encounters, Uncertain Foetuses
We examine pregnant women's experiences with routinised obstetric ultrasound as entailed in their antenatal care during planned pregnancies. This paper highlights the ambiguity of ultrasound technology in the constitution of maternal-foetal connections. Our analysis focusses on Australian women's experiences of the ontological, aesthetic and epistemological ambiguities afforded by ultrasound. We argue that these ambiguities offer possibilities fo…
Sidestepping questions of legitimacy
Empirical studies of community participation in health services commonly tie effectiveness to the perceived legitimacy of community representatives among health staff. This article examines the underlying assumption that legitimacy is the major pathway to influence for community representatives. It takes a different vantage point from previous research in its examination of data (primarily through 34 in-depth interviews, observation and recording…
Biography, pandemic time and risk
During the 2009 H1N1 pandemic, it was identified that women in the third trimester of pregnancy were particularly at risk of serious respiratory distress. At-risk women were advised to seek vaccination, avoid contact with anyone unwell, maintain hygiene routines and stop smoking. We examine this situation of emergent and intense risk produced at the intersection of individual biography and the historical event of a public health emergency. We exa…
Emerging Infectious Disease/Emerging forms of Biological Sovereignty
Public health responses to emerging infectious disease (EID) rarely try to interrupt the mobility of goods and information. Rather, designed under the rubric of ''public health security,'' they extend the rationale of free circulation through efforts to intensify movement and communication between international agencies, national health (and defence) departments, and the pharmaceutical industry. In this way, public health security extends postlib…
Understanding pandemic influenza behaviour
Pandemic influenza represents an ongoing public health threat. Understanding the associated behavioural domain is vital for future intervention development. Cross-sectional qualitative research employing purposive sampling employed a combination of one-to-one semi-structured interviews ( n = 57) and focus groups ( n = 59). Data were analysed using (1) inductive thematic analysis and (2) theoretical thematic analysis focusing upon resonance with p…
The 'Informed Matter' of Gay and Bisexual Men's (Potential) Use of HIV Antiretrovirals to Prevent Covid-19
In 2020, there were reports that HIV antiretrovirals, specifically the combination tenofovir disoproxil fumarate and emtricitabine (TDF/FTC), had therapeutic potential for COVID-19. In the context of scant empirical evidence at the time to confirm such an effect, we sought to understand the ways that gay and bisexual men (GBM) made sense of-and embodied-information about HIV antiretrovirals in relation to preventing and/or treating COVID-19. We c…
Techno-legal expertise and the datafication of the state
As governments around the world become increasingly datafied, debates are emerging about the best ways to attend to the complex socio-political implications of big data and the datafication of the state. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with senior executives and data experts within Australian government agencies, high-level privacy experts, and other experts in public sector data integration, this article examines how a sociotechnical imagi…
Speaking as a woman”
There is a tension in social-constructionist psychological accounts of the subject. On the one hand, the notion of the originary, substantive “I” is critiqued through an emphasis on the intersubjective constitution of subjects. On the other, the agency of this socially constituted subject is taken as a given. I analyse this tension as it is played out in attempts to understand the often-fraught position of “speaking as a woman”. In order to under…
Speaking as a woman”
There is a tension in social-constructionist psychological accounts of the subject. On the one hand, the notion of the originary, substantive “I” is critiqued through an emphasis on the intersubjective constitution of subjects. On the other, the agency of this socially constituted subject is taken as a given. I analyse this tension as it is played out in attempts to understand the often-fraught position of “speaking as a woman”. In order to under…
Interrupting Neo-liberal Subjectivities
Meaningful evaluation of sex and relationship education
Effective sex and relationship education promotes agency and targets sexual practice as it is socially produced. The aim of evaluation therefore is to contribute to good sexual health through identifying when and how education is promoting agency and changes in sexual practice. Good evaluation takes account of the complexities of the specific object being addressed—sexual practice—which is fluid and essentially social. Innovative study design and…
Living history, undoing linearity
If we accept that social research is not simply a matter of representation, but involves actively intervening in and constructing our current social and political conditions, we are then presented with a set of problems about representation and intervention. The methodology, memory‐work, is introduced here as one specifically developed for the purposes of undertaking politically engaged social research. In this paper, I describe the rationale and…
X. Breaking Alignments between ‘the Personal’ and ‘the Individual’
Analysing Everyday Experience
Could researching experience contribute to creating socio-political change or does it simply open new avenues for post-Fordist self-regulation? This book illustrates the emergence of plural historical
Transfiguring Relations
What is the relationship between social action initiatives and theory? In this paper we suggest that, like social action, theory is a means of intervening in social problems and is integrally linked with future possibilities. Devising the means of effective intervention requires the ability to understand and harness people's ways of actively striving to deal with the social problems which emerge in their everyday lives. Such efforts involve commu…
Analysing Everyday Experience
Interest in researching experience continues to grow in sociology, cultural studies, feminist theory and psychology. However there is a crisis over the representation of experience - evident in epistemological debates, in everyday life and in global politics. Could researching experience contribute to creating socio-political change or does it simply open new avenues for post-Fordist self-regulation? Analysing Everyday Experience illustrates the …
Analysing Everyday Experience
Interest in researching experience continues to grow in sociology, cultural studies, feminist theory and psychology. However there is a crisis over the representation of experience - evident in epistemological debates, in everyday life and in global politics. Could researching experience contribute to creating socio-political change or does it simply open new avenues for post-Fordist self-regulation? Analysing Everyday Experience illustrates the …
Living with HIV and negotiating psychological discourse
Since the introduction of antiretroviral drug treatments, there has been increased interest in the psychological aspects of living with HIV and a growth of related research and therapeutic literature. While there has been concern about the 'remedicalization' of HIV, there is apparently less concern about its 'psychologization'. This article considers how the expansion of psychological discourse about HIV impacts on the lives of HIV-positive peopl…
Escape Routes
Governing the Future
Increasingly, governmental responses to incalculable, but high-consequence, threats to life and security are framed by what has been described as the 'precautionary principle' (Ewald), 'preparedness' (Collier, Lakoff & Rabinow) or 'pre-emption' (Derrida). This article redescribes features common to these characterizations as the paradigm of prudence and examines how this approach to risk management is playing out in the context of fears that feat…
From the Feminist Politics of Lived Experience to the Social Spaces of Epidemics
Securitising health
This paper analyses contemporary Australian newspaper coverage of the threat of pandemic influenza in humans, specifically in the light of recent transformations in biomedical and public health understandings of infectious disease as continuously emerging. Our analysis suggests that the spectre of pandemic influenza is characterised, in newspaper accounts, as invoking a specific form of nation building. The Australian nation is depicted as succes…
Risk, insurance, preparedness and the disappearance of the population
The Australian response to the threat of pandemic influenza is part of a broader shift in public health and governance. This shift in approach to risk – from insurance to preparedness – has been triggered by the emergence of incalculable, global, catastrophic risks. Familiar, insurance-driven approaches to governing risk work by intervening at the level of the population. However, incalculable risks of the scale posed by pandemic influenza exceed…
A review of Security, Territory, Population
Exit from the Regime of Life Control
In its early 20th century materialisation, risk was calculable and these calculations were primarily based on assessments of the past. By the end of the century, risk was increasingly considered to be fundamentally incalculable and it has become the object of the work of anticipation. This paper elucidates this shift by examining three regimes of life control. The Life/Culture System pervades early 20th century cultural and political thinking: wo…
A Social Public Health
The author discusses social relations and the prevention of infectious disease. He comments on a study from 1966 that examined how doctors started prescribing drugs and found that the relationship between doctors had the greatest influence on prescribing habits. He mentions the role of social connections that are involved in infectious disease transmission. He talks about differences between social public health and new public health concerning i…
Emerging Infectious Disease/Emerging forms of Biological Sovereignty
Public health responses to emerging infectious disease (EID) rarely try to interrupt the mobility of goods and information. Rather, designed under the rubric of ''public health security,'' they extend the rationale of free circulation through efforts to intensify movement and communication between international agencies, national health (and defence) departments, and the pharmaceutical industry. In this way, public health security extends postlib…
Compliant, complacent or panicked? Investigating the problematisation of the Australian general public in pandemic influenza control
This Is Class War from Above and They Are Winning It
What is to be done in conditions where capitalo-normativity is so pervasive? Escape Routes was written as an attempt to think the possibility of politics from below against this ubiquitous capitalist spell over life. The book does not look for social transformation in existing organized forms of resistance. It tries to think how transformative occasions emerge that allow those who have no part to enter and change the conditions of existence altog…
Beyond the Distinction Between Biomedical and Social Dimensions of HIV Prevention Through the Lens of a Social Public Health
Developing effective HIV prevention requires that we move beyond the historical but problematic distinction between biomedical and social dimensions of HIV. The current claim that prevention has failed has led to a strong interest in the role of treatment as HIV prevention; however, the turn to “biomedical prevention,” “test and treat,” and “combination prevention” instances pervasive confusions about prevention. These confusions arise from a fai…
Kippax and Stephenson Respond
We are pleased that Aral and Blanchard concur that public health needs to move beyond the distinction between biomedical and social dimensions of HIV prevention and resist the increasing biomedicalization of HIV prevention. This move is particularly important in the current context in which HIV prevention is increasingly linked to treatment. Effective HIV prevention, including “treatment as prevention,” requires that people change their social pr…
Between Individual Agency and Structure in HIV Prevention
When HIV prevention targets risk and vulnerability, it focuses on individual agency and social structures, ignoring the centrality of community in effective HIV prevention. The neoliberal concept of risk assumes individuals are rational agents who act on information provided to them regarding HIV transmission. This individualistic framework does not recognize the communities in which people act and connect. The concept of vulnerability on the oth…
Mobilising “vulnerability” in the public health response to pandemic influenza
Political science (33 obras) · Sociology (29 obras) · Medicine (26 obras) · Law (23 obras) · Psychology (18 obras) · Public health (18 obras) · Politics (16 obras) · Public relations (16 obras) · Law (15 obras) · Disease (11 obras)