Deborah LuptonUNSW Sydney | UNSW · Centre for Social Research in Health
Deborah Lupton
PhD
About
377
Publications
254,329
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Introduction
I am a sociologist who has researched topics relating to medicine and public health, risk, the body, the emotions, parenting culture, food and eating, fat politics, the unborn and digital health. My current research focuses on digital sociology and the use of new digital media technologies in medicine and public health. I am also interested in 'live sociology', or creative and inventive methods for sociological research, and in using social and other digital media for academic purposes.
Additional affiliations
February 2014 - present
August 2011 - present
Publications
Publications (377)
Introduction:
The COVID-19 crisis has wrought major changes to people's lives across the globe since the beginning of the outbreak in early 2020. The "Australians' Experiences of COVID-19" qualitative descriptive study was established to explore how Australians from different geographical areas and social groups experienced the COVID-19 crisis.
M...
There are numerous ways that researchers can creatively approach social research and translation. This article discusses elements from the first stages of a novel project that centres social research translation in the form of a public exhibition. 'Creative Approaches to Health Information Ecologies' is a project by a multidisciplinary research tea...
Since the outbreak of COVID-19 globally, a range of vaccines has been developed and delivered to reduce viral transmission and prevent COVID cases. This article reports findings from a qualitative research project involving telephone interviews with a diverse group of 40 adult Australians about their experiences of the COVID crisis. Interviews were...
In recent times, public discussions about risk, including by experts, political and business leaders and peak non-government organizations, have been fraught and contested, entwined with political ideologies and vested commercial interests. This chapter examines two contemporary global risk controversies: those concerning the climate emergency and...
The COVID-19 crisis has generated an intensity of feeling globally, as people’s everyday spatial and embodied practices have been continually disrupted and fraught with anxiety and uncertainty. In this visual essay, I present and engage with smartphone photographs of public spaces in the Australian cities of Canberra and Sydney that I have accumula...
A zine made from a workshop involving using creative arts-based methods to think through, problematise and contest imaginaries and practices of automated care, and to develop future-oriented ideas about possibilities for better automated care.
This brief communication puts forward an argument for expanding the concept of ‘digital health’ to that of ‘digital One Health’ by going beyond a human-centric approach to incorporating nonhuman agents, including other living things, places and space. One Health approaches recognise the interconnected and ecological dimensions of human health and w...
This chapter offers highly original perspectives on social media use from a new materialism perspective. Based on interview data, it reconsiders the role of agency in social media participation in order to challenge increasingly popular complaints about social media as purely manipulative or exploitative. As social media platforms such as Facebook...
With pandemic conditions and social distancing disrupting traditional research methods, the COVID-19 pandemic has left many researchers turning to digital and creative methods, perhaps for the first time. Despite the significant challenges qualitative researchers have faced during the pandemic, this chapter considers what potentials these condition...
It is widely recognised that while many young people in high-income countries are active users of digital health technologies, their engagement can be short term. In this article, we draw on feminist materialism theory to analyse findings from the two qualitative phases of a mixed-methods three phase study of English secondary students' digital hea...
Purpose
In this article, the authors aim to explore mobile apps as both mundane and extraordinary digital media artefacts, designed and promoted to improve or solve problems in people's lives. Drawing on their “App Stories” project, the authors elaborate on how the efficiencies and affordances credited to technologies emerge and are performed throu...
Background
The aim of this study was to use indepth social research to better understand the relationships and intersections between understandings and practices of COVID-19 risk, immunity and vaccination in lay people’s accounts.
Methods
This article reports findings from a qualitative research project involving semi-structured telephone intervie...
In this article, we present ideas about developing innovative methods for the sociology of futures. Our approach brings together the literature on sociotechnical imaginaries and the sociology of futures with vital materialism theories and research-creation methods. We draw on our research-creation materials from a series of online workshops. The wo...
People’s ideas and practices concerning their personal data and digital privacy have received growing attention in social inquiry. In this article, we discuss findings from a study that adopted the story completion method together with a theoretical perspective building on feminist materialism to explore how people make sense of and respond to digi...
Everyday life is increasingly automated with the use of new and emerging digital technologies and systems. Discussion of these automated technologies is often shrouded with narratives which highlight extreme and spectacular examples, rather than the ordinary mundane realities that characterise the overwhelming majority of people's actual encounters...
Personal digital data are often imagined and experienced as invisible and immaterial phenomena, albeit with increasingly powerful impacts on people’s lives. In this article we discuss findings from an ethnographic project involving 30 participants in Sydney, Australia, directed at identifying their practices and understandings concerning their home...
Online sexual health services potentially transform modes of engagement with service users. We report findings from an in-depth interview study with users of a photo-diagnosis service offered by an established UK-based online sexual health service (SH:24). Adopting a sociomaterial theoretical perspective, we analyse the interviews for descriptions...
COVID Societies presents a compelling and accessible overview of key sociocultural theories that can help us make sense of the diverse, dynamic and complex elements of the COVID crisis. These include discussions of the political economy perspective; biopolitics; risk society and cultures; gender and queer theory; and more-than-human theory. The boo...
Restrictions on physical movements and in-person encounters during the COVID-19 crisis confronted many qualitative researchers with challenges in conducting and completing projects requiring face-to-face fieldwork. An exploration of engaging in what we term ‘agile research’ in such circumstances can offer novel methodological insights for researchi...
Human bodies are frequently rendered into digitised and datafied formats. People go online, use apps, carry or wear mobile devices, and move around in spaces equipped with digital sensors. When people engage with these technologies, a plethora of information is generated with and about them. This might include their appearance and their bodily func...
Background:
Medical practitioners can experience considerable stress and poor mental health during their careers, with doctors in training known to be particularly vulnerable. Previous research has documented work-related factors that may play a role in the mental health status of junior doctors. However, these and additional factors, need to be e...
Introduction
Ever since the widespread distribution and adoption of digital technologies in everyday life from the 1980s onwards, two counter imaginaries have been expressed in both the popular media and the academic literature. The first imaginary deals with the techno- utopian dimensions of novel digital technologies: that is, the almost magical...
As nations reel from the effects of poverty, inequality, climate change and the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, it feels as though the world has entered a period characterized by pessimism, cynicism and anxiety. This book challenges individualized understandings of emotion, revealing how they relate to cultural, economic and political realities...
People living with pre-existing illnesses were identified as one of the groups most at risk when COVID-19 erupted. In this article, using the method of case studies developed from interviews, we explore how Australians in this category considered their risk and responded to it as they were learning about COVID-19 and living with restrictions and lo...
Mobile applications (commonly known as ‘apps’) are highly popular forms of software, with hundreds of billions of downloads globally each year. The ways in which the affordances of apps are portrayed on the app store platforms are crucial in sparking consumers’ initial interest. This article presents findings from the ‘Mapping the Food App Landscap...
A chapter outlining three sociological perspectives on digital health and applying them using COVID-19 as an example: the political economy perspective, Foucauldian theory, and the more-than-human approach.
In this article, we use the case study method to detail the experiences of five participants who reported living with pre-existing mental illness during COVID-19. We adopted a sociomaterial analytical approach, seeking to identify how human and nonhuman agents came together to generate states of wellbeing or distress during this challenging period....
Digital transformations are well underway in all areas of life. These have brought about substantial and wide-reaching changes, in many areas, including health. But large gaps remain in our understanding of the interface between digital technologies and health, particularly for young people.
The Lancet and Financial Times Commission on governing h...
The implementation of physical distancing measures and lockdowns across the globe to control the spread of COVID-19 has led to the home becoming a focal point of exercise and fitness activities for many people. A plethora of digital tools were hastily assembled to help people workout at home or in spaces close to home: including apps with workout s...
This chapter provides a background to the book, outlining the rationale for the importance of using creative methods in health education across the sites at which it is researched, taught and implemented. The chapter discusses key concepts and theoretical perspectives underpinning thinking, making, doing, teaching and learning with creative methods...
In this chapter, I discuss some findings from my Data Personas study. The methods adopted for this study brought together the cultural probe of the ‘data persona’ with a customized online forum for engaging the responses of the participants. Before discussing the findings of the study, I begin with an overview of its theoretical and conceptual unde...
The COVID-19 crisis in Australia led to a rapid increase in the use of telehealth services to offer psychological therapy (often referred to as ‘telepsychology’). In this article, we discuss the intersection of the social psychology concepts of therapeutic holding spaces and containment with more-than-human theory as it relates to Australia's menta...
Concepts and practices related to risk are central to people’s experiences of the COVID-19 crisis and attempts to contain the spread of the novel coronavirus. Sociological perspectives and empirical research on risk and uncertainty have much to offer for insights into how people conceptualise and respond to health risks such those associated with t...
Major changes to home life and work practices globally have been brought about by the COVID-19 crisis. Periods of strict restrictions placed on people’s movements outside their homes, aimed at curbing the spread of the novel coronavirus, have meant that the home was requisitioned as a primary site for work for many people. In this article, we draw...
Popular media and policy discussions of digital health for supporting older people in the ‘super-aged’ context of Japan often focus on novel technologies in development, such as service robots, AI devices or automated vehicles. Very little research exists on how Japanese people are engaging with these technologies for self-care or the care of other...
An analysis of how Australian news outlets reported the novel coronavirus outbreak and COVID-19 in January 2020 as the pandemic was emerging.
Background
A multitude of information sources are available to publics when novel infectious diseases first emerge. In this paper, we adopt a qualitative approach to investigate how Australians learnt about the novel coronavirus and COVID-19 and what sources of information they had found most useful and valuable during the early months of the pande...
The Preface and Introduction chapter for The Face Mask in COVID Times: A Sociomaterial Analysis
This chapter discusses the contribution made by sociomaterial theoretical perspectives in understanding the human body in the context of health, illness and medicine. The central argument made is that health, illness and disease, and health care may all be viewed as more-than-human phenomena that bring together human bodies with nonhuman things, pl...
In this chapter, I discuss the role of zines as a medium for representing, documenting, and communicating health-related topics and experiences. The history of this genre of zines, beginning with a flowering of work in the early era of the HIV/AIDS epidemic and culminating in the COVID-19 era in a proliferation of “quaranzines,”, providing public h...
In wealthy countries such as Australia, learning and teaching practices in schools have become increasingly digitised as educational technology (EdTech) initiatives gather momentum. This digitisation inevitably involves rendering many dimensions of students’ bodies, activities and practices into digital data formats across learning areas: including...
Digital technologies are increasingly used in many areas of sport, exercise and health, including in schools. In this article, I engage with sociomaterial theory, and particularly concepts drawn from feminist new materialism, to address the question of how health and physical education (HPE) teachers in the context of the Australian education syste...
Self-tracking technologies and practices offer ways of generating vast reams of personal details, raising questions about how these data are revealed or exposed to others. In this article, I report on findings from an interview-based study of long-term Australian self-trackers who were collecting and reviewing personal information about their bodie...
This is the introduction chapter for the edited book 'The COVID-19 Crisis: Social Perspectives', edited by Deborah Lupton and Karen Willis
This chapter provides an overview of research on the social aspects of infectious disease outbreaks prior to COVID-19, thus 'setting the scene' for the book. It includes discussion of social histories, political economy perspectives, social constructionism, risk theory, Foucauldian theory, postcolonial theory and sociomaterial analyses.
Facebook is the most used social media platform globally, despite frequent and highly publicised criticism of some of its practices. In this article, we bring together perspectives from vital materialism scholarship – and particularly Jane Bennett’s concept of ‘thing-power’ – with our empirical research on Australian Facebook users to identify what...
The COVID-19 crisis in Australia led to a rapid increase in the use of telehealth services to offer psychological therapy (often referred to as 'telepsychology'). In this article, we discuss the intersection of the social psychology concepts of therapeutic holding spaces and containment with more-than-human theory as it relates to Australia's menta...
Background
A diverse array of digital technologies are available to children and young people living in the Global North to monitor, manage, and promote their health and well-being.
Objective
This article provides a narrative literature review of the growing number of social research studies published over the past decade that investigate the type...
This is an afterword for the edited book Research Methods in Digital Food Studies.
This rapid research brief synthesises the evidence on whether COVID-19 has had an impact on public sentiment in relation to privacy and the widespread use of data and technology by the government in responding to the public health crisis, be it through tracing, compliance, or enforcement.
Background A multitude of information sources are available to publics when novel infectious diseases first emerge. In this paper, we adopt a qualitative approach to investigate how Australians learnt about the novel coronavirus and COVID-19 and what sources of information they had found most useful and valuable during the early months of the pande...
Over the past few years, the public image of the hugely successful social media platform and internet empire Facebook has been significantly undermined by high levels of negative publicity worldwide, concerning alleged user-privacy incursions such as the high-profile Cambridge Analytica scandal. Facebook is often portrayed in popular and academic d...
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to report on the findings from the Digital Privacy Story Completion Project, which investigated Australian participants' understandings of and responses to digital privacy scenarios using a novel method and theoretical approach.
Design/methodology/approach
The story completion method was brought together with D...
Since their introduction in 2008, software applications for mobile devices ("apps") have become extremely popular forms of digital media. Mobile apps are designed as small bits of software for devices such as smartphones, tablet computers, smartwatches, and other wearable devices. This chapter presents a sociological analysis of apps through the le...
Significant restrictions on movement outside the home due to the global COVID-19 pandemic have intensified the importance of everyday digital technologies for communicating remotely with intimate others. In this article, we draw on findings from a home-based video ethnography project in Sydney to identify the ways that digital devices and software...
Apstrakt:
Od njihovog pojavljivanja, 2008. godine, softverske aplikacije za mobilne uređaje („aps“) postale su veoma popularni oblici digitalnih medija. Mobilne aplikacije dizajnirane su kao mali bitovi softvera za uređaje poput pametnih telefona, tablet računara, pametnih satova i drugih prenosivih uređaja. Ovo poglavlje predstavlja sociološku ana...
Short article published in Medium outlining three key sociological perspectives on digital health in the COVID crisis: political economy, Foucauldian and more-than-human theory
In this article, I present findings from my Data Personas study, in which I invited Australian adults to respond to the stimulus of the ‘data persona’ to help them consider personal data profiling and related algorithmic processing of personal digitised information. The literature on social imaginaries is brought together with vital materialism the...
Digital health technologies are often advocated as a way of helping people monitor, promote and manage their health, care for others and reduce the burden on healthcare systems. Yet these technologies have also been subject to criticism for limiting human flourishing and exacerbating socioeconomic disadvantage. Bioethical appraisals of digital heal...
To fully understand the sociocultural implications of the COVID-19 crisis, it is important to be aware of the substantial body of research in sociology, anthropology, history, cultural geography and media studies on previous major infectious disease outbreaks. This chapter 'sets the scene' by providing this context with an overview of the relevant...
This is a chapter providing an overview of digital sociology, published in Public Sociology (4th edition). It includes suggestions for teaching prompts and discussion questions, further reading and suggestions for websites and films/documentaries to use for teaching.
As the number of digital technologies expands, entering more domains of everyday life, people’s activities, bodies and preferences are rendered into constantly changing flows of digitised information. The interdisciplinary field of critical data studies has emerged in response. In this article, we outline the design and development of methods emplo...
A crowdsourced document initiated by Deborah Lupton in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic as a resource for social researchers needing to rethink their research methods during periods of lockdowns and physical isolation, where in-person methods cannot be conducted.
Since their introduction in 2008, software applications for mobile devices ('apps') have become extremely popular forms of digital media. Mobile apps are designed as small bits of software for devices such as smartphones, tablet computers, smartwatches, and other wearable devices. This chapter presents a sociological analysis of apps through the le...
The Internet of Things (IoT) is a vast, dispersed system in which a diverse array of objects, humans, and other living things is connected via “smart” technologies and the Internet. In this article, I present a thematic review of the literature that focuses on the social dimensions of the IoT. Drawing on research published in sociology, anthropolog...
In this chapter, I address the sociocultural dimensions of wearable devices: small, lightweight technologies that can be readily placed on human bodies as they move around in time and space. While wearable devices have not always been and need not be digital (examples are spectacles, pedometers, and prosthetic limbs), I focus here on the new range...
In this chapter, I examine the ways in which the phenomenon of excessive food consumption and preparation is portrayed on YouTube. To do so, I draw on two case studies: ‘cheat day’ videos posted to her channel by Asian-American fitness and health influencer Stephanie Buttermore, and cooking videos on the Epic Meal Time channel made by a group of wh...
This is a Sage Methods case study, which outlines how to use the story completion method together with a more-than-human theoretical orientation
Self-tracking practices have attracted burgeoning academic interest in recent years. This article draws on interviews with Australians who identify as regular self-trackers, examining the ways in which they describe their encounters with and enactments of their personal data. Vital materialism perspectives are employed to analyse and interpret the...
In this article, I combine the arts-based methods of story completion and poetic inquiry to work towards a more-than-human approach to health literacy. In doing so, I seek to surface the affective, multisensory and relational dimensions of health information practices. My use of poetic inquiry is innovative in several ways. First, I used materials...
A tabular overview of the major approaches to new materialisms, including key authors and theorists
Reams of digitised information about people are continually generated as they engage online, use apps and move around in sensor-embedded spaces. These personal data can help people to learn more about themselves, but they are also accessed and exploited by third parties.
In Data Selves, internationally-renowned digital sociologist Deborah Lupton d...
Projects
Projects (14)
The Trust in Digital Health study was conducted by the Centre for Social Research in Health in partnership with community organisations representing four of the priority populations in the current national BBV/STI strategies: people with HIV, trans and gender diverse people, sex workers, and gay and bisexual men.
Our methods included a national, online cross-sectional survey (April–June 2020) of the general population, including specific recruitment targets for the four priority populations. We also conducted semi-structured interviews with key informants (March–June 2020) with expertise in communities affected by BBVs/STIs, stigma and marginalisation.
The survey sample included 2,240 eligible participants, including 600 (26.8%) classified as members of one or more priority populations. Overall, priority populations reported the lowest levels of trust in digital technologies and in some health care services, and the most frequent experiences of stigma.
Key informants were keenly aware of the promise and benefits of digital health, but also concerned about the risks and consequences of communities affected by BBVs/STIs engaging with these systems. Specific issues related to different populations, but there was a shared focus on the harmful impacts of experiencing stigma and discrimination in health settings.
