Deborah Lupton

• PhD
• Professor at UNSW Sydney

The autistic-led project ‘Autistic Supports for Comfort, Care and Connection’ explores how autistic adults employ a range of objects, services and creatures to support their wellbeing. The study’s findings offer insights into the everyday and creative ways that autistic people understand, (re)imagine and engage with non-human support activities, pr...

Since the advent of the COVID‐19 pandemic, several ways of understanding time have emerged: what we may call ‘COVID time’. Based on 40 qualitative online interviews in 2022 with Australians living across the continent, this article examines how people situated themselves and COVID‐19 in historical time. It further explores how material aspects, pla...

In recent times, the micro-video sharing platform TikTok has become extremely popular globally, especially among young people. Psychological and medical topics are among the diverse array of issues addressed on TikTok, sometimes sparking controversies over how “accurate” or helpful the information is. One such issue concerns TikTok content relating...

I’ve had a lot of fun experimenting with creative methods over the past few years, drawing on arts- and design-based approaches. I’ve put together a booklet that showcases 13 of these methods. Each page features one method, providing a brief overview and an example from studies and public research engagement and translation activities I’ve conducte...

There has been great interest in the potential for generative AI and large language models (LLMs), and ChatGPT in particular, to contribute to the fields of medicine and public health. This position paper provides a brief overview of the literature that has been published on the potential uses and benefits of these tools for medical and public heal...

This narrative review and meta-analysis summarizes a broad evidence base on the benefits—and also the practicalities, disbenefits, harms and personal, sociocultural and environmental impacts—of masks and masking. Our synthesis of evidence from over 100 published reviews and selected primary studies, including re-analyzing contested meta-analyses of...

This report provides a scoping review of the literature on the ways that novel generative AI tools are being applied to living things and other elements of ecosystems and the natural environment. The report outlines several areas where generative AI is being deployed in new research projects and industry applications. These include animal communica...

This research briefing paper presents preliminary findings from the ‘Diverse Experiences and Understandings of Immunity in the Pandemic Age’ project, conducted in 2022-2023. The aim of this research was to identify how Australians from specific at-risk social and community groups experience and understand the relationship between immunity and good...

The COVID-19 crisis is still affecting millions of people worldwide. However, government and mass media attention to the continuing loss of life, severe illness and prolonged effects of COVID-19 has subsided, rendering the suffering of those who have become ill or disabled, or who have lost loved ones to the disease, largely hidden from view. In th...

Deborah Lupton is a renowned academic whose research has made significant contributions to the field of digital sociology and the sociocultural dimensions of medicine and public health. In an interview with Reciis, Lupton discusses one of the main contemporary challenges - misinformation and fake news - through the lens of digital sociology and add...

Three‐dimensional (3D) printing is a process of fabricating objects using computer‐aided design software and hardware that responds to instructions from the software. This entry provides an overview of 3D printing technologies, including their current and proposed uses. Some of the social, cultural, political, and ethical issues concerning 3D print...

The national online survey findings reported in this report are from the most recent stage of the ‘Australians’ Experiences of COVID-19’ project. Conducted in mid-September 2023, this representative survey investigates 1,000 Australians’ experiences of COVID-19 and preventive practices such as vaccination and face mask wearing, their perceptions of...

Introduction The concept of ‘wellbeing’ is typically thought of in human-centric ways, referring to the affective feelings and bodily sensations that people may have which inform their sense of health, safety, and connection. However, as our everyday lives, identities, relationships, and embodiments become digitised and datafied, ‘wellbeing’ has ta...

Creative Approaches to Health Information Ecologies is a study into how people make sense of health information and how they understand the connections between their health, wellbeing, community and world.

An expanded and full revised third edition of 'Risk', which first was published in 1999, with the second edition published in 2013. Ten years later, this 3rd edition includes additions to all the chapters and a brand new chapter on misinformation and post-truth politics related to the climate and COVID-19 crises

The idea of passing on messages and knowledge to future generations is an ancient one, and yet it is at the same time ‘new’, as we seek to come to grips with social, technological and cultural change in this COVID era. The COVID-19 crisis has had significant gendered impacts, with increased unemployment, higher rates of mental distress and decreasi...

En este artículo aportamos una reflexión sobre la sociología digital diez años después de su desarrollo, incluyendo una entrevista a Deborah Lupton, una de las investigadoras más destacadas del ámbito de la investigación social digital. En esta entrevista, Lupton reflexiona sobre la sociología digital desde una mirada actual, consciente de los camb...

At the same time as humans are becoming increasingly interested and emotionally invested in nonhuman animals (including pets, farm animals, animals in captivity and wild animals), the internet, apps and digital devices are playing an ever-more prominent role in people’s everyday lives. This book examines the nexus between these two parallel but inc...

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. Met...

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...

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...

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...

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...