Deborah Lupton

• PhD
• Professor at UNSW Sydney

Food activism often involves challenging established modes of food production and consumption, which may mean looking for unusual alternatives to food production and promoting unfamiliar ingredients or modes of preparing and processing materials for human consumption as acceptable and valuable. In this chapter, we address the topic of 3D printed fo...

In this introduction to the special issue on digital media and body weight, the author brings together fat studies and critical social analyses of digital media to discuss the manifold ways in which body weight, size, and shape are represented and performed in and with these media. A proliferation of diverse voices and images receive expression in...

The concept of datafication - which refers to the idea that many aspects of life can be rendered into digital data which can subsequently be analysed and used to understand, predict and guide interventions in society - has been both enthusiastically engaged with and critically deconstructed in recent literatures. In this article, we explore the rel...

In this chapter, I provide an overview and analysis of the ways in which food and eating practices and preferences are documented and represented with digital technologies. The chapter includes discussion of websites, blogs, social media and mobile apps. These digital media work to represent, locate and share food-related images, ideas, beliefs and...

Parents have accessed websites, online discussion forums and blogs for advice, information and support since the early days of the World Wide Web. In this article, we review the literature in sociology and related social research addressing the ways in which digital media have been used for parenting-related purposes. We begin with the longer-estab...

Frequent statements are now made in the medical and public health literature about an imminent revolution in health care, preventive medicine and public health driven by the use of digital devices and associated apps, websites and platforms. However it is important to adopt a more critical approach when assessing the impact and implications of digi...

Background Many women in countries in the global North access digital media information sources during pregnancy and the early years of motherhood. These include websites, blogs, online discussion forums, apps and social media platforms. Little previous research has sought to investigate in detail how women use the diverse range of digital media no...

This chapter focuses in particular on the digital health phenomenon as it has been taken up in health promotion endeavors, or what I will refer to here as “digitized health promotion.” The discussion identifies digitized health promotion as the latest stage in the trajectory of health promotion ideology and practice over the past four decades in we...

In this chapter I examine the concepts and uses of data as they are expressed in representations of self-tracking (otherwise known as life logging, the quantified self or personal informatics).Self-tracking is not only a technology of the self, but it is also a data practice. Self-tracking may be further conceptualised as a data practice that produ...

This PowerPoint presentation was presented at the University of Canberra, 13 May 2016, at a forum 'Digital Potentials for Health - Narrowing the Divide', News & Media Research Centre/UC Health Research Institute. In the paper I discussed what critical sociological perspectives could offer to the analysis of digital health, outlined some important r...

In this article, we present an analysis of how communities of maternal feeling are configured by users on the discussion boards of Mumsnet, a popular British online parenting forum. A search was conducted to find threads with the phrase ‘I feel’ in the title. The first 100 threads in the search results using this term that referred to emotions – al...

The concept of self-tracking has recently begun to emerge in discussions of ways in which people can record specific features of their lives, often using digital technologies, to monitor, evaluate and optimize themselves. There is evidence that the personal data that are generated by the digital surveillance of individuals (dataveillance) are now u...

In this presentation, I discuss some of my current work addressing personal digital data ontologies and practices. In so doing, I draw on some theoretical perspectives that I am developing on the following issues: the social, cultural and political dimensions of digital data; the notions of ‘lively devices’ and ‘lively data’; the personal digital d...

Background: There are now many pregnancy and parenting apps available on the market for both pregnancy and parenting. Aims: To investigate how Australian women use pregnancy and parenting apps, their attitudes about the information provided and data privacy and security related to such use, and what features they look for in these apps. Methods...

This brief introductory chapter to the book outlines the reasons for writing the book and its theoretical underpinnings and provides a description of each ensuing chapter's contents.

This commentary is an attempt to begin to identify and think through some of the ways in which sociocultural theory may contribute to understandings of the relationship between humans and digital data. I develop an argument that rests largely on the work of two scholars in the field of science and technology studies: Donna Haraway and Annemarie Mol...

In this article, we draw on the findings of a critical discourse analysis of pregnancy-related mobile software applications designed for smartphones (‘apps’) to examine how such apps configure pregnant embodiment. Drawing on a detailed analysis of all such apps available in June 2015 in the two major global app stores Google Play and Apple App Stor...

Health risk behavior involves actions and related attitudes and perceptions that contribute to people's propensity to engage in, or avoid, activities that have been deemed by experts to be hazardous or dangerous to their health. Considerable research in public health and medicine has been devoted to identifying health risks and the behaviors associ...

In this article, I provide some reflections on critical digital health research in the context of Health's 20th anniversary. I begin by outlining the various iterations of digital technologies that have occurred since the early 1990s - from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 to Web 3.0. I then review the research that has been published on the topic of digital hea...

In this article, we sketch a 'manifesto' for the 'public understanding of big data'. On the one hand, this entails such public understanding of science and public engagement with science and technology-tinged questions as follows: How, when and where are people exposed to, or do they engage with, big data? Who are regarded as big data's trustworthy...

IntroductionLike other forms of embodiment, pregnancy has increasingly become subject to representation and interpretation via digital technologies. Pregnancy and the unborn entity were largely private, and few people beyond the pregnant women herself had access to the foetus growing within her (Duden). Now pregnant and foetal bodies have become op...

Previous research has found that pregnant women and women in the early years of parenthood now often turn to digital media sources of information and support. One recent form of digital media to which they have access is the mobile software applications (‘apps’) available for smartphones and other mobile devices. There are now hundreds of such apps...

A new form of representing selfhood and embodiment has emerged in the wake of the development of 3D printing technologies. This is the 3D printed self replica, a fabrication using digital 3D body scans of people that produces a material artefact of a person’s entire body or parts thereof. The technologies to generate these artefacts are rapidly mov...

In this chapter I discuss the ways in which people engage with the data that are generated from their interactions with online technologies and digital sensing and communication devices. Due to the reactive and responsive nature of computer software and the ubiquity of the devices that people carry with them or that sense their movements, the lives...

Blog post outlining the social, cultural and political dimensions of the big data phenomenon, with a further reading list on key works in critical data studies

More than 100,000 mobile phone software applications ('apps') have been designed for the dissemination of health and medical information and healthcare and public health initiatives. This article presents a critical analysis of self-diagnosis smartphone apps directed at lay people that were available on the Apple App Store and Google Play in mid-Ap...

An increasing number of smartphone and software applications (“apps”) have been developed and marketed to assist in the process of diagnosis, yet little attention has been paid to their content, claims, potential risks, limitations or benefits of their use. This study sought to describe and catalogue available diagnosis apps and explore their impac...

This chapter introduces the work of the influential American feminist techno-science studies writer Donna Haraway and shows how it may be used to theorise the new digital technologies used in the health and medical sphere. Haraway’s concept of the cyborg has particularly inspired cultural theorists who have written about the implications of technol...

Michael Gard raises some important issues in his opinion piece on digitised health and physical education (HPE) in the school setting. His piece represents the beginning of a more critical approach to the instrumental and solutionist perspectives that are currently offered on digitised HPE. Few commentators in education, health promotion or sports...

In this chapter I examine the ways in which human bodies interact with and are configured by digital technologies and how these technologies generate new knowledges and practices in relation to bodies. I use infants and young children as a case study to explain these aspects. From before they are even born, children’s bodies are now frequently repr...

This editorial presents an overview of digital health technologies, discusses previous research and introduces the contributions to the special issue “Beyond Techno-Utopia: Critical Approaches to Digital Health Technologies”. It is argued that thus far, few critical analyses of digital health technologies have been published in the social science l...

A body of literature on self-tracking has been established in human-computer interaction studies. Contributors to this literature tend to take a cognitive or behavioural psychology approach to theorising and explaining selftracking. Such an approach is limited to understanding individual behaviour. Yet self-tracking is a profoundly social practice,...

Discussions of digital health technologies in the popular media and the medical and public health academic literature frequently comment on how these technologies might offer new or improved ways of delivering health care, conducting health promotion activities and monitoring public health. Following the presentation of an overview of the range of...

The advent of 3D printing technologies has generated new ways of representing and conceptualising health and illness, medical practice and the body. There are many social, cultural and political implications of 3D printing, but a critical sociology of 3D printing is only beginning to emerge. In this article I seek to contribute to this nascent lite...

We now live in a digital society. New digital technologies have had a profound influence on everyday life, social relations, government, commerce, the economy and the production and dissemination of knowledge. People’s movements in space, their purchasing habits and their online communication with others are now monitored in detail by digital techn...

Although over 100,000 health and medical mobile apps have been placed on the market, few critical social analyses have been yet undertaken of the role of these apps in healthcare, preventive health and health promotion. In this article I present an argument for approaching the study of mobile apps as sociocultural artefacts, focusing specifically o...

A range of digitized health promotion practices have emerged in the digital era. Some of these practices are voluntarily undertaken by people who are interested in improving their health and fitness, but many others are employed in the interests of organizations and agencies. This article provides a critical commentary on digitized health promotion...

This is a pre-print of a chapter to be published in The Routledge Handbook of Risk Studies

The concept of 'self-tracking' (also referred to as life-logging, the quantified self, personal analytics and personal informatics) has recently begun to emerge in discussions of ways in which people can voluntarily monitor and record specific features of their lives, often using digital technologies. There is evidence that the personal data that a...

Digital health technologies are playing an increasingly important role in healthcare, health education and voluntary self-surveillance, self-quantification and self-care practices. This paper presents a critical analysis of one digital health device: computer apps used to self-track features of users' sexual and reproductive activities and function...

The developers of public health campaigns have often attempted to elicit disgust to persuade members of their target audiences to change their behaviour in the interests of their health. In this critical essay, I seek to problematise this taken-for-granted and unquestioned tactic. I assert that the pedagogy of disgust in public health campaigns has...

This article presents an analysis of two related Australian government-sponsored “obesity” prevention campaigns, including documents produced by commercial social research companies reporting the formative research and evaluation of these campaigns. This material is critically analyzed for its underlying assumptions about weight “obesity” and the p...

As part of the digital health phenomenon, a plethora of interactive digital media platforms have been established in recent years to elicit lay people's experiences of illness and health care. The overt function of these platforms is to provide forums where patients and caregivers can share their experiences with others, benefit from the support an...

When the pregnancy of Kate Middleton, the Duchess of Cambridge, was announced in early December 2012, the news received high attention in the news media and social media outlets. What was immediately noticeable about this coverage was the immediate configuring of a new personage: that of the ‘royal foetus’. Spoof Twitter accounts were set up on beh...

The concepts of ¿self-tracking¿ and ¿the quantified self¿ have recently begun to emerge in discussions of how best to optimize one¿s life. These concepts refer to the practice of gathering data about oneself on a regular basis and then recording and analyzing the data to produce statistics and other data (such as images) relating to one¿s bodily fu...

The sub-discipline of digital sociology has recently begun to attract attention among sociologists, particularly in the UK. In this paper I undertake a review of some of the most interesting features of the body of digital sociology scholarship as it has thus far emerged. Some might contend that digital sociology is simply a new name for a long-est...

While it is generally accepted in writings on the sociocultural aspects of risk that risk and emotion are interrelated, this relationship remains under-theorised. The literature on the affect heuristic model in psychology and research on voluntary risk-taking or edgework in sociology have dominated previous writings on risk and emotion. This essay...

This chapter explains and reviews the four dimensions of digital sociology: professional digital practice, sociological analysis of digital media use, digital data analysis and critical digital sociology.

Risk (second edition) is a fully revised and expanded update of a highly-cited, influential and well-known book. It reviews the three major approaches to risk in social and cultural theory, devoting a chapter to each one. These approaches were first identified and described by Deborah Lupton in the original edition and have since become widely used...

This article draws upon research involving in-depth interviews with 60 mothers of young children about the home healthcare in which they engage when promoting their children’s health and dealing with their illnesses, allergies or developmental problems. The study found that a series of often interconnected discourses were evident in the women’s acc...

This book is a sociological analysis of the different historical, social and cultural contexts in which human embryos and foetuses are created, develop and are visualised and understood. It includes discussion of such topics as human embryonic stem cell research, abortion politics, the role of ultrasound and foetal surgery and photography, pregnant...

The phenomenon of digital health has emerged as a key dimension of contemporary healthcare policy and delivery in many countries. This review article focuses on one aspect of digital health discourses: the concept of patient engagement that encourages patients to take up the new digital media technologies to engage in self-monitoring and self-care,...

A compilation of open access material on the unborn human, including sociological, bioethical, historical, medical, scientific and public health articles and an original introduction by the editor.

The new apparatus of what is often termed ‘digital health’ (and also ‘Health 2.0’, ‘Medicine 2.0’, eHealth’ or ‘mHealth’), a conglomeration of new digital technologies addressed at delivering healthcare, preventive medicine and health promotion, has facilitated a focus on measuring and monitoring the functions and activities of lay people’s bodies...

The developers of public health campaigns have often attempted to elicit the emotion of disgust to persuade members of their target audiences to change their behaviour in the interests of their health. This article identifies and analyses the dominant types of disgust that were employed in a collection of public health campaign texts. It was found...

In this chapter I discuss aspects of digital technologies as they are employed in medicine and health promotion through the lens of the ideas of Donna Haraway. I begin with an overview of Haraway’s work, and then focus on her writings on the cyborg. Then follows an account of the new digital health technologies and discussion of how the concept of...

Mobile and wearable digital devices and related Web 2.0 apps and social media tools offer new ways of monitoring, measuring and representing the human body. They are capable of producing detailed biometric data that may be collected by individuals and then shared with others. Health promoters, like many medical and public health professionals, have...

This article describes how infants' bodies were portrayed in a range of Australian popular media texts. Four main discourses on infant embodiment were identified: the infant as ‘precious’, ‘pure’, ‘uncivilised’ and ‘vulnerable’. While, on the one hand, infants were positioned as the most valuable and affectively appealing of humans, they were alter...

This publication is a collection of short articles published by sociologist Deborah Lupton on her blog and The Conversation website dealing with topics relating to the politics of body weight. The articles include discussion of obesity and fat politics, fat activism, the Health at Every Size movement, fat stigma and discrimination, motherhood and c...

The fully revised second edition of Risk explores the social and cultural theoretical approaches to risk, including those offered by Beck, Giddens, Douglas and Foucauldian governmentality approaches. Also examines risk and subjectivity, risk and Otherness and the pleasures of risk-taking.

This chapter brings the maternal body back in to view by focusing on the embodied experiences of pregnancy. To do so, I draw first on feminist sociological and philosophical inquiries into the ontology of pregnant embodiment and then on empirical research that has sought to elicit women’s experiences of pregnancy and their concepts of the unborn gr...

This chapter addresses the topics of abortion, pregnancy loss and the disposal of aborted embryos and foetuses and surplus IVF embryos. While these are very different issues, they all refer to the ways in which the unborn are understood in relation to the continuum of ‘life’ or ‘personhood’ and to concepts of and practices around the death or loss...

In the space of merely half a century, the unborn have emerged into the public spotlight from their previous dark and enigmatic domain. This chapter details the various ways in which visualising devices such as obstetric ultrasound technology, powerful microscopes, foetal photography and computer-generated imagery, as well as news and social media...

Should the unborn be viewed as fully ‘persons’ in moral and ethical terms? Should they be considered indeed fully ‘human’? What are the implications for how they are treated in medical and scientific procedures, and for the pregnant women in whose bodies many, but not all, unborn entities are located? As this chapter will demonstrate, the answers t...

In the context of a growing emphasis on risk in contemporary developed societies, unborn entities sited in utero have increasingly become portrayed as ‘at risk’ from various dangers, most of which are viewed as conveyed to them via the actions of the maternal body in which they are developing. This chapter examines the intensification of discourses...

This brief conclusion brings together the main findings of the book, particularly in relation to the diversity and complexity of contemporary configurations of the unborn assemblage and the ways in which it interacts with the maternal assemblage. Alternative ways of thinking about the relationship between the unborn and maternal assemblages are sug...

Little sociological research has focused specifically on the moment of birth. In this article we draw upon interview data with women who had very recently given birth for the first time to explore the ways in which they described both their own embodiment and that of their infants at this time. We use the term 'the body-being-born' to describe the...

In the interests of promoting the health and wellbeing of their foetuses, pregnant women are subject to imperatives which expect them to engage in an intense ascetic regime of self-regulation and disciplining of their bodies. This review article draws upon scholarship from the humanities and social sciences on pregnancy, foetal personhood and risk...

This book discusses fat politics and fat embodiment. It seeks to explain why the fat body is so reviled in contemporary societies. The major debates between advocates of anti-obesity measures, obesity sceptics, libertarians and fat activists are reviewed. The book also looks at the experiences of fat people, or the phenomenology of fatness.

The new mobile wireless computer technologies and social media applications using Web 2.0 platforms have recently received attention from those working in health promotion as a promising new way of achieving their goals of preventing ill-health and promoting healthy behaviours at the population level. There is very little critical examination in th...

Mothers in contemporary western societies are expected to adhere to the principles of intensive parenting, spending a great deal of time and effort caring for their children, protecting them from risks and promoting their health, development and wellbeing. This paper draws upon research involving indepth interviews with 60 mothers of infants and yo...

A growing literature on the biopolitics of contemporary maternity and on risk society, individualisation and parenting has demonstrated the increasing emphasis that has been placed upon pregnant women and mothers to take responsibility for the health and welfare of their children. The ideal female ‘reproductive citizen’ is expected to place her chi...

An overview of what digital sociology is and how sociologists can use social and other digital media in their work.

This article brings together a range of research and scholarship from various disciplines which have investigated and theorized social and cultural aspects of infants’ bodies within the context of contemporary western societies. It begins with a theoretical overview of dominant concepts of infants’ bodies, including discussion of the concepts of th...

Medicine as Culture is unlike any other sociological text on health and medicine. It combines perspectives drawn from a wide variety of disciplines including sociology, anthropology, social history, cultural geography, and media and cultural studies. The book explores the ways in which medicine and health care are sociocultural constructions, rangi...

Mothers and pregnant women in contemporary western societies are at the centre of a web of expert and lay discourses concerning the ways they should promote and protect the health and development of their foetuses and infants. This article reports the findings from an Australian study involving interviews with 60 mothers. The findings explore in de...

: Front-page coverage of medical and health stories in the Sydney Morning Herald over the one-year period, April 1992 to March 1993, was analysed. Features of the front-page stories, such as major topics, geographic location, visual imagery, use of news actors and news sources, the representation of medicine and health, the use of language in headl...