Holy pharma! : healthism discourses in a pharmaceutical advertising website : a thesis presented in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Psychology at Massey University

Pages 123 and 143 are missing from the original copy.Modern changes in the public health philosophy and government legislation reflect a desire of health for all. The changes support a new healthism ideology that controls the experience and definition of health. Scholars parallel the function of healthism to that of a religion that meets the needs of a modern secular culture. This study examines a pharmaceutical advertising website, taking a social constructionist stance to investigate dominant representations of healthism and any parallels to the values and practices of Western religion. The website selected is published by a pharmaceutical marketing group that has been disseminating health and product information for l0 years. The installment of March-April 2009 was examined in its entirety. A critical discourse analytic approach drawing on Durkheim and Foucault was adopted to analyse texts, images, and videos. Particular attention was given to the similarities and differences of healthism and religion in terms, meanings, subject positioning and function. Results show healthism to parallel religion in its construction as information, instruction and ritual practice. The expert discourse within healthism promotes a morality that parallels and deviates from religious values with a turn toward the value of the self. This expert discourse informs healthism discourses, constructing a doctrine of unquestionable behaviours that legitimate ritualized health practices. When viewed as an integral entity, the form, content, and function of healthism in pharmaceutical advertising takes on the religious connectivity of values, beliefs and practices that underlies all social life. The website is an intense concentration of coercive and symbolic power to inform the institutionalized social system ofs healthism

Review of Early Quakers and their Theological Thought

In Early Quakers and their Theological Thought, Stephen Angell and Pink Dandelion have provided students and scholars of early Quakerism with an invaluable tool, capturing not only the vibrancy of the early Quakers’ intellectual world, but also the vitality of Quaker studies in the present day. This review will especially consider Douglas Gwyn’s chapter on Quaker origins, and the final three chapters on William Penn, George Keith and George Whitehead respectively, before reflecting on the book as a whole

”Oooh...that’s a bit weird”: Attempting to rationalise the irrational and explain the unexplainable

In this paper I aim to explore how people make sense of their anomalous experiences in contemporary society. Using data collected from unstructured interviews with six women I consider the ways in which these experiences are conveyed, articulated and constructed

The Equality of Care of Separated Children in Ireland: Report to The One Foundation

This study sets out to answer four questions. (1) Why the response to separated children differs to that offered to Irish children in need of state care. (2) Whether equal treatment with Irish children in the care of the state would represent a significant improvement in the lives of separated children. (3) If equal treatment is an appropriate aspiration what are the barriers to achieving this in relation to policy, administration, practice or system issues? (4) How might a funder or NGO intervene effectively to improve the situation

Dirac Lie groups, Dirac homogeneous spaces and the Theorem of Drinfeld

The notions of \emph{Poisson Lie group} and \emph{Poisson homogeneous space} are extended to the Dirac category. The theorem of Drinfel$'$d (\cite{Drinfeld93}) on the one-to-one correspondence between Poisson homogeneous spaces of a Poisson Lie group and a special class of Lagrangian subalgebras of the Lie bialgebra associated to the Poisson Lie group is proved to hold in this more general setting

Interlude of Ice Cubes

Poetry by Madeline Lucchetti