Against misinformation

An analysis of \u27misinformation\u27, a primary framing for vaccination dissent, illuminates weaknesses in understanding vaccination controversy and the dissemination of false beliefs. Rather than approaching vaccine dissenters as misinformed, we can identify how untruths circulate in good-faith efforts to identify facts and clarify the challenges that the Internet poses to elites\u27 control of information. When we shift our view, we can see how narrow social networks and lack of empathy for others drives polarized perceptions of \u27fake news\u27 and threatening cultural trends. The antidote to these problems is education in empathy, enhanced identification with others different from ourselves. Examples from the Covid-19 pandemic and Black Lives Matter protests in the U.S. provide illuminating perspectives about how the humanities can be harnessed to solve persistent social problems. (DIPF/Orig.

An Epidemiology of Information: Data Mining the 1918 Influenza Pandemic

An Epidemiology of Information: Data Mining the 1918 Influenza Pandemic seeks to harness the power of data mining techniques with the interpretive analytics of the humanities and social sciences to understand how newspapers shaped public opinion and represented authoritative knowledge during this deadly pandemic. This project makes use of the more than 100 newspaper titles for 1918 available from Chronicling America at the United States Library of Congress and the Peel’s Prairie Provinces collection at the University of Alberta Library. The application of algorithmic techniques enables the domain expert to systematically explore a broad repository of data and identify qualitative features of the pandemic in the small scale as well as the genealogy of information flow in the large scale. This research can provide methods for understanding the spread of information and the flow of disease in other societies facing the threat of pandemics

Vaccination and the Public in the 21st Century

Presented on March 1, 2016 in the Stephen C. Hall building, room 102 from 12:00 p.m. to 1:30 p.m.Bernice Hausman is a faculty affiliate in Women’s and Gender Studies, ASPECT, and Science and Technology in Society. She is also a professor at the Virginia Tech Carilion School of Medicine, where she teaches a humanities course to second-year students and serves as an advisor to students interested in narrative medicine and the medical humanities. Her current research into vaccination involves qualitative ethnographic studies and a book about vaccine skepticism in the 21st century.Runtime: 49:55 minutesUnderstanding contemporary vaccination controversy demands sensitive attention to the meaning of scientific evidence i the public sphere. Approaching vaccine skepticism from a rhetorical perspective reveals how vaccination controversy is embedded in its historical context, is responsive to various trends in both medicine and the law, and is not simply the result of scientific illiteracy. This talk will focus on a few specific vaccination controversies in order to highlight how ordinary people on both sides of the issue make decisions about vaccination and represent their own reasoning as deliberative and embedded in their values and world views. The talk may touch on the effect of inflammatory news reporting about vaccination and disease outbreaks on public understanding of the controversy and its possible solutions

Women's liberation and the rhetoric of "choice" in infant feeding debates

<p>Abstract</p> <p>This short essay examines infant formula marketing and information sources for their representation of "choice" in the infant feeding context, and finds that while providing information about breast and bottle feeding, infant formula manufacturers focus on mothers' feelings and intuition rather than knowledge in making decisions. In addition, the essay considers how "choice" operates in the history of reproductive rights, shifting the discourse from a rights-based set of arguments to one based on a consumerist mentality. Utilizing the work of historian Rickie Solinger and a 2007 paper for the National Bureau of Labor Statistics, I argue that the structure of market work, and not abstract maternal decision making, determine mothers' choices and practices concerning infant feeding. For true freedoms for mothers to be achieved, freedoms that would include greater social provisions for mothers, our culture will have to confront how structural constraints make breastfeeding difficult, as well as how the concept of choice divides mothers into those who make good choices and those who do not.</p

Infant Feeding: Milk sharing

The advent of Internet forums that facilitate peer-to-peer human milk sharing has resulted in health authorities stating that sharing human milk is dangerous. There are risks associated with all forms of infant feeding, including breastfeeding and the use of manufactured infant formulas. However, health authorities do not warn against using formula or breastfeeding; they provide guidance on how to manage risk. Cultural distaste for sharing human milk, not evidenced-based research, supports these official warnings. Regulating bodies should conduct research and disseminate information about how to mitigate possible risks of sharing human milk, rather than proscribe the practice outright.