Using Social Media for Actionable Disease Surveillance and Outbreak Management: A Systematic Literature Review

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Untangling Neoliberalism’s Gordian Knot: Cancer Prevention and Control Services for Rural Appalachian Populations

In eastern Kentucky, as in much of central Appalachia, current local storylines narrate the frictions and contradictions involved in the structural transition from a post-WWII Fordist industrial economy and a Keynesian welfare state to a Post-Fordist service economy and Neoliberal hollow state, starving for energy to sustain consumer indulgence (Jessop, 1993; Harvey, 2003; 2005). Neoliberalism is the ideological force redefining the “societal infrastructure of language” that legitimates this transition, in part by redefining the key terms of democracy and citizenship, as well as valorizing the market, the individual, and technocratic innovation (Chouliaraki & Fairclough, 1999; Harvey, 2005). This project develops a perspective that understands cancer prevention and control in Appalachiaas part of the structural transition that is realigning community social ties in relation to ideological forces deployed as “commonsense” storylines that “lubricate” frictions that complicates the transition

Care with Aloha: Preventing Suicide in Oahu, Hawaii

This dissertation examines iterations of care in preventing suicide in Oahu, Hawaii. Rates of suicidal ideation among young people in Hawaii have been high over the past decade, peaking in 2009 at nearly double the U.S. average for this age demographic. My fieldwork (2014—2019) follows the efforts of prevention workers in Honolulu, Hawaii and shows that a majority of those involved in (predominantly unpaid) prevention work share affective connections to the cause of prevention, with many having personally lost someone to suicide. In this dissertation, I position suicide prevention workers’ care with aloha as an alternative to depersonalizing approaches of Western suicide prevention efforts, which rely on protocol. I examine aloha’s many contested meanings and (mis)uses in and beyond Hawaii and draw on ethnographic examples to reveal how care workers in Hawaii describe a type of “watchful” (Garcia 2010) care and explicitly aim to personalize their interactions with aloha. And yet, my ethnography reveals that there are troubling inconsistencies when putting this type of care into practice. In this dissertation, I ask whether care as the primary tool of suicide prevention workers in the United States must be viewed as being either helpful or harmful, productive or nonproductive. Through examining suicide care in Hawaii, I ask whether these dualistic concepts might be better evaluated as coexisting rather than competing. Regarding the forms of care that are produced in prevention work in Hawaii, care seems to be simultaneously loaded with and empty of meaning—a statement that, my dissertation reveals, shares similarities with the word and concept of aloha—and is complicatedly both effective and ineffective, regulated and unregulated. In this ethnography, I understand care as a practice, an ethics of the self, an action, a form of (exploitable) labor, a (bio)political endeavor that produces and reinforces inequalities—but fundamentally, I view care as something that is relational, that is produced out of a desire to relate with others. This dissertation suggests that rather than relying on these dualities, we might instead view care as a kind of open-ended concept: as something on a flexible spectrum, open to possibility

Scoring Loss in Some Recent Popular Film and Television

This is a pre-copyedited, author-produced PDF of an article accepted for publication in Music Theory Spectrum following peer review. The version of record is available online at: https://doi.org/10.1093/mts/mtu014A certain tonally- and temporally oriented progression of two triads, dwelt upon usually through undulation, accompanies scenes depicting the contemplation of a considerable sorrowful loss in many popular films and throughout one television program produced between 1985 and 2012. In lieu of any strong stylistic precedent for this musico-dramatic association, certain structural relationships between the two triads relative to other triadic pairings may account for possible motivations of the association

A Narrative Intervention with Oncology Professionals: Stress and Burnout Reduction through an Interdisciplinary Group Process

The increased prevalence of cancer diagnoses ensures that oncology healthcare professionals will be faced with more challenges than ever before in their work with cancer patients, especially in hospital environments. The literature demonstrates that professional caregivers are at risk for burnout (BO), compassion fatigue/secondary traumatic stress (CF/STS), job stress and job satisfaction and have minimal forums for which they can share their experiences. In an environment of ever-shrinking resources, it is imperative to use innovative methods to help the professionals cope with the day-to-day challenges of caring for terminally ill individuals. This exploratory mixed-methods study investigated the efficacy of a narrative intervention group with oncology professionals. Forty oncology health care providers from three inpatient oncology units completed the Health Consultants’ Job Stress & Job Satisfaction Questionnaire (HCJJSQ), the Professional Quality of Life Scale: Compassion Satisfaction, Burnout and Fatigue Scale Version IV (ProQOL-CSF-R-IV), and the Maslach Burnout Inventory-Human Services Survey (MBI-HSS) with subscales of emotional exhaustion (EE), depersonalization (DP) and personal accomplishment (PA), pre- and post-intervention along with post-session evaluations with three Likert questions and three open-ended questions in addition to ten in-depth interviews. Statistically significant decreases were found in BO, CF/STS, EE, DP, and job stress with significant increases in job satisfaction from the first month to the fourth month. Professionals discussed the rigors of their work and their impressions of the narrative oncology groups reporting overall positive experiences with specific appreciation for shared perspectives and finding comfort within the narrative exchange

An exploration of lay epidemiology and cancer

Some estimates suggest that as much as 70% of cancer is preventable by disease modification alone (Peto 1991). Disease prevention via behavioural change is a challenging endeavour. There is widespread recognition that for behaviour to be better understood there is a need to understand the context in which it occurs, and the beliefs that underpin it. Lay epidemiology illustrates the sophistication of belief formation. The arrival at a coronary candidate provides according to Davison, Frankel and Davey Smith (1991), a cultural mechanism that aids the estimation of risk as observed from known cases in the family and wider society. Consequently, the estimate provides the potential motivation for behavioural choices. Other studies that followed the original model of lay epidemiology have similarly described the coronary candidate (Preston 1997; Emslie, Hunt & Watt 2001a; Frich, Malterud & Fugelli 2007; Weiner 2009) and suggest that the lay public have an understanding of the risk profile for Coronary Heart Disease. This study aimed to explore the utility of the elements held within lay epidemiology in cancer beliefs. Do the lay public recognise a ‘cancer candidate’? Method: A series of 31 in-depth semi-structured interviews were conducted between November 2007 and October 2008. Interviews took place in two communities in Glasgow, Scotland – one affluent, one deprived. The sample was drawn from a number of community organisations and leisure clubs in the communities to facilitate accessing an ‘ordinary’ view. Cancer sufferers were excluded from the study. A topic guide was used to ensure consistency throughout interviews and focused on participants’ experience of cancer. Although the study did not adhere to a strict grounded theory approach, the analytic method of constant comparative analysis was followed. Findings: The complexity of the scheme described by Davison, where a wide range of sources of knowledge to inform beliefs resonated. Sophisticated and complex explanatory models of cancer were described. Cancer inhabited an important cultural position and was most commonly associated with fear and dread. Possible aetiological explanations included behavioural, environmental, biological and psychological factors. Smoking was the most widely recognised risk factor. Knowledge of other risk factors for individual cancers was patchy. Candidacy therefore was not as unequivocal for cancer. Many ‘anomalous cases’ (those without obvious explanation) were proffered. Ultimately the randomness of cancer was emphasised. Conclusion: Cancer is a more complex disease than CHD, both culturally and biomedically and this is reflected in the beliefs voiced by participants in this study. This complexity is a barrier to the adoption of a cancer candidate