Mark D M Davis

• PhD
• Monash University (Australia)

This chapter examines biopolitical troubles in the communication of expert advice regarding vaccination for COVID-19. Messaging about vaccination was challenging due to the multiple vaccines and their different efficacy. Media controversy surrounded vaccine supply delays and the slow pace of vaccination in aged care and amongst other vulnerable gro...

No abstract available. This open peer commentary responds to an article by McCoy et al. 'Ethical responsibilities for companies that process personal data'. We argue that a regulatory framework for data ethics that does not acknowledge power structures is unlikely to create the enabling conditions for just and equitable data practices. Our commen...

Steering against superbugs is about navigating barriers and opportunities in the global governance of antimicrobial resistance (AMR). The book’s nineteen chapters offer a broad range of social science perspectives, structured around six AMR governance themes. These include: (i) how AMR challenges are framed and conceptualized internationally; (ii)...

Steering against superbugs is about navigating barriers and opportunities in the global governance of antimicrobial resistance (AMR). The book’s nineteen chapters offer a broad range of social science perspectives, structured around six AMR governance themes. These include: (i) how AMR challenges are framed and conceptualized internationally; (ii)...

My Health Record is Australia’s national, digital, personal health record system. All Australians have a record in the system unless they choose to opt out of it. Concerns about privacy, security and unwanted sharing of data, particularly in marginalised populations, may impede its use. We conducted a national, online survey of Australians’ attitud...

In the context of breast cancer, women who refuse reconstruction are often portrayed as having limited agency or control over their bodies and treatment. Here we assess these assumptions by paying attention to how the local contexts and inter-relational dynamics influence women's decision-making about their mastectomized body in Central Vietnam. We...

Introduction: In 2018, following government policy changes to Australia's national electronic health record system, 'My Health Record', consumer advocates-including organisations representing people living with HIV, people who use drugs and sex workers-raised concerns about privacy and data security. Responding to these controversies, this study ex...

Behind the statistics forecasting millions of deaths associated with antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is an even greater burden of morbidity leaving many people with long-term chronic illnesses and disability. Despite growing recognition of the importance of inter-sectoral and inter-disciplinary knowledge in forming responses to address this global h...

Individual antibiotic use for common infections is a focus for public health efforts seeking to prevent antimicrobial resistance (AMR). These approaches employ a binary opposition of responsible and irresponsible antibiotic use with a focus on the knowledge, behaviours and intentions of the individual. To overcome these unhelpful tendencies and rev...

In 2018, the Australian Government adopted an 'opt-out' strategy to increase participation in My Health Record (MHR), the national digital patient record system. Opt out was rationalised through discourse on the universal right to health. Media controversy ensued due to privacy fears, security and commercial exploitation of patient information. LGB...

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is a global public health crisis that is now impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. Little is known how COVID-19 risks influence people to consume antibiotics, particularly in contexts like Bangladesh where these pharmaceuticals can be purchased without a prescription. This paper identifies the social drivers of antibioti...

This paper employs an assemblage lens to generate analyses of general public narratives on antimicrobial resistance (AMR). Global efforts to reduce AMR include communications aiming to promote general public awareness, provide knowledge, encourage careful antibiotics use, and discourage demands for them. These efforts are somewhat compromised by th...

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is now recognised as a social, cultural, economic and political phenomenon, positioning the social sciences as central in responding to this global health threat. Yet efforts to address AMR within hospital settings, for example through antimicrobial stewardship (AMS) programs, continue to focus primarily on the prescr...

This chapter interrogates how assumptions about biomedical HIV prevention configure social factors as largely secondary to effectiveness, either as barriers to rollout and uptake of treatment as prevention (TasP), or as the pliable conduits for the same processes. They also gloss over the reflexivity of people who are the subjects of biomedical HIV...

As antibiotics have become increasingly ineffective against bacteria, antibiotic stewardship has been introduced across a variety of settings world-wide. Members of the public have been entreated to use antibiotics strictly as prescribed. We interviewed ninety-nine participants who shared their understandings of antibiotics and reflections on antib...

A common theme in the stories of the people we interviewed was the action and reputation of news media, including printed, digital, and television news. These media were often the first source of knowledge about the emerging pandemic and for some the basis for adoption of a new at risk identity. This chapter examines a key finding that individuals...

Pandemics, Publics, and Narrative explores how members of the general public experienced the 2009 swine flu pandemic. It examines the stories related to us by individuals about what happened to them in 2009, their reflections on news and expert advice given to them, and how they considered vaccination, social isolation, and other infection control...

Chapter 6 explores the narratives of people who, due to vulnerabilities associated with their health status, including severe respiratory illness and HIV-positive serostatus, and because of coincident pregnancy, had to respond to the pandemic to protect themselves and unborn children. This chapter, therefore, addresses the importance of biography f...

Immunity is another important biopolitical metaphor that helped to shape storytelling about swine flu in everyday life. Immunity has a double meaning in that it is a biomedical concept linked with bodies and vaccines, but it is also a legal concept concerning self and the suspension of responsibilities to collective life in particular circumstances...

Chapter 2 considers in more detail the growing significance of narrative approaches to health communication on pandemic threats, reflecting on the conceptual bases for this turn in light of perspectives from narrative theory and biopolitical accounts of infectious diseases. Key themes are the folk-tale undercurrents of pandemic narratives that appe...

Contagion is an age-old method of signifying infectious diseases like influenza and is a rich metaphor with strong biopolitical connotations for understandings of social distance, that is, the self as distinct from the other in the sense of space and identity. Contagion is therefore an important metaphor for the social distancing approaches recomme...

The 2009 swine flu pandemic turned out to be milder than it seemed to be in the first few weeks, yet it was serious for those with serious illness or who were pregnant at the time. These features of the pandemic produced communications dilemmas for experts, including a threat to public trust. With reference to the moral tale of the “boy who cried w...

The concluding chapter revisits the key themes of the book and reflects on them in light of the prospects for “narrative public health.” The significance of narrative and its mediations for a global public emergency and the more general turn to narrative in health communications, can be construed as the formation of a narrative public health. We re...

Chapter 3 examines the keynote of pandemic communications in 2009: “Be alert, not alarmed.” A central communication challenge of the 2009 pandemic was advising publics throughout the world to prepare themselves for a possible health catastrophe, but without inspiring panic and therefore jeopardizing effective government. This imperative has been ch...

News media can be an important source of information about emerging health threats. They are also significant sites for the production of narrative on threats to life that help to condition and reflect the responses of governments and publics. Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is one such health threat with particular significance because it represent...

Increased public engagement is a feature of policy and communications focussed on the reduction of antimicrobial resistance. Explaining antimicrobial resistance for general publics has proven difficult and they continue to endorse apparently mistaken knowledge, including the conflation of antimicrobial resistance with the notion of the resistant bo...

This paper explores the understandings of antibiotics and antimicrobial resistance (AMR) among ethnically diverse informants in Melbourne, Australia. A total of 31 face-to-face semi-structured qualitative interviews were conducted with a sample of ethnic in-patients who were admitted with an acquired antimicrobial infection in a public hospital (n...

Objectives: Drivers of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) are diffuse and complex including a range of interspecies behaviours between pet owners and their animals. We employed interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) to explore the relationship between pet owners and their companion animals in relation to AMR. Design: Cross sectional, qualitativ...

The use of HIV Treatment as Prevention (TasP) has radically changed our understandings of HIV risk and revolutionised global HIV prevention policy to focus on the use of pharmaceuticals. Yet, there has been little engagement with the very people expected to comply with a daily pharmaceutical regime. We employ the concept of HIV citizenship to explo...

This chapter examines uncertainty in the expert advice on pandemics given to members of the general public. The chapter draws on research conducted in Australia and Scotland on public engagements with the 2009 influenza (swine flu) pandemic and discusses implications for communications on more recent infectious disease outbreaks, including Ebola an...

Background: Multi-drug resistant bacteria are an increasing concern in both human and veterinary medicine. Inappropriate prescribing and use of antibiotics within veterinary medicine may be a contributory factor to antimicrobial resistance (AMR). The 'One Health' Initiative aims to work across species and environments to reduce AMR, however; littl...

The looming global antibiotic crisis, and the need to curtail over-use, has been positioned variously as a medical problem, an urgent public health concern, and an issue of governance and political will. But few questions have been raised in terms of its economic drivers. Specifically, how infection management—and the problematic of antimicrobial r...

Table S1. Study characteristics.

Table S2. Behavioural domains, Theoretical Domains Framework constructs, behaviour change technique groupings and individual BCTs identified from intervention descriptions.

Objectives In an innovative approach to improve the contribution of health psychology to public health we have analysed the presence and nature of affect within the visual materials deployed in antimicrobial stewardship interventions targeting the public identified through systematic review. Design A qualitative analysis focused on the affective c...

Objectives Changing public awareness of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) represents a global public health priority. A systematic review of interventions that targeted public AMR awareness and associated behaviour was previously conducted. Here, we focus on identifying the active content of these interventions and explore potential mechanisms of acti...

Background Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is a growing public health problem across the world. As the negative consequences of AMR become apparent at local, national and international levels, more attention is being focussed on the variety of mechanisms by which AMR is potentiated. We explore how interactions between pet owners and veterinarians re...

Background: A global antimicrobial resistance (AMR) awareness intervention targeting the general public has been prioritized. Objectives: To evaluate the effectiveness of interventions that aim to change AMR awareness and subsequent stewardship behaviours amongst the public. Methods: Five databases were searched between 2000 and 2016 for inter...

The growing global concern around antimicrobial mis-use and proliferating resistance has resulted in increasing interest in optimising antibiotics, particularly in hospitals. While the agenda to tighten antibiotic use has been critically explored in metropolitan settings, the dynamics of rural and remote settings have remained largely unexplored. D...

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) imperils health for people across the world. This enormous challenge is being met with the rationalisation of prescription, dispensing and consumption of antimicrobials in clinical settings and in the everyday lives of members of the general population. Individuals need to be reached outside clinical settings to prepa...

Table S1. Sample characteristics of men (n = 999).

“Public Trust in Expert Knowledge: Narrative, Ethics, and Engagement” examines the social, cultural, and ethical ramifications of changing public trust in the expert biomedical knowledge systems of emergent and complex global societies. This symposium was conceived as an interdisciplinary project, drawing on bioethics, the social sciences, and the...

Objectives: The aim of the study was to explore preparedness for the HIV self-test among men who have sex with men (MSM) and those involved in HIV prevention and care. Methods: A mixed methods exploratory research design was employed, detailing awareness and willingness to use the self-test and the perceived barriers and facilitators to implemen...

Hook-up websites and apps are said to be transforming the sexual lives of gay men and have been linked with the apparent erosion of gay publics as the basis for identity politics and social action. This article examines these dynamics in the interview and focus-group talk of gay men living on the economic and geographical margins of metropolitan ga...

Associations of sexual identity with a range of sexual and sexual health behaviours were investigated amongst men who have sex with men (MSM). Data from 1816 MSM recruited from 4 Celtic nations (Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland) were collected via a cross-sectional online survey advertised via social media. About 18.3%...

Objective To assess the awareness and acceptability of pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) among men who have sex with men (MSM) and use sociosexual media at high risk of HIV infection in four Celtic nations. Design Cross-sectional study. Methods Online self-complete survey of 386 HIV-negative/status unknown MSM who reported condomless anal intercourse...

Objective There has been an increase in new HIV diagnoses among young men who have sex with men (YMSM) over the past decade in both UK and US contexts, with online sex-seeking implicated in driving this development. This study sought to examine YMSM's use of a variety of social and sexual networking websites and ‘apps’, and assess sexual risk behav...

Anthropology and cognate disciplines have long addressed the complex and troubled relations of public and private life, supplying insight into such matters as identity, politics, and civic life. In the multiple, interconnected settings of an intricately globalized and mediatized twenty-first century, how secrets are made, maintained, and broken rem...

Many Australians live in attractive urban-fringe and semi-rural environments which are said to be places that promote health and well-being. Yet, each summer, these residents are asked by authorities to prepare for episodic, intensely unpredictable bushfire emergency. In 2012/2013, we interviewed 17 people who lived on the rural fringe of Melbourne...

High levels of undiagnosed HIV infection, alongside emerging prevention biotechnologies necessitate regular, at least yearly testing of at-risk populations. Here we examine multiple barriers to HIV testing for UK MSM. Methods: Cross-sectional online surveys were conducted with (n=2080) MSM recruited from Facebook and gay sociosexual networking medi...

Influencing the general public response to pandemics is a public health priority. There is a prevailing view, however, that the general public is resistant to communications on pandemic influenza and that behavioural responses to the 2009/10 H1N1 pandemic were not sufficient. Using qualitative methods, this paper investigates how members of the gen...

Influenza viruses are radically uncertain, leading to scientific and procedural challenges for diagnosis and surveillance and lending influenza symptoms a high degree of indeterminacy. In time of pandemic influenza, however, members of the general public are asked to enact non-pharmaceutical infection control measures such as hygiene and social dis...

This article examines discourse on immunity in general public engagements with pandemic influenza in light of critical theory on immuno-politics and bodily integrity. Interview and focus group discussions on influenza with members of the general public reveal that, despite endorsement of government advice on how to avoid infection, influenza is see...

Recent sociological analyses of contemporary emergency planning foreground a potential break between preparedness plans animated by the spectre of an imaginary future catastrophe and classical public health efforts that are anchored in close knowledge of populations and efforts to prevent the transmission of disease. Whilst scholarly analysis to da...

In this article, we examine the apparent resistance of publics to messages regarding pandemic influenza. The 2009 H1N1 pandemic was addressed through media: governments used print, broadcast, and digital media to advise publics to enact hygiene practices and comply with social isolation; news media took up the pandemic as a lead story. Publics, how...

There is great interest in what testing, pharmaceutical, information and social media technology can do for sexual health. Much programmatic and research activity is focused on assessing how these technologies can be used to best effect. Less obvious are analyses that place technology into historical, political and real-world settings. Developing a...

Pandemic influenza represents an ongoing public health threat. Understanding the associated behavioural domain is vital for future intervention development. Cross-sectional qualitative research employing purposive sampling employed a combination of one-to-one semi-structured interviews (n = 57) and focus groups (n = 59). Data were analysed using (1...

In this article, I examine the narrative-media nexus as it relates to pandemics. Communications feature in global public health efforts to address the emergence of a pandemic, an event typically marked by the proliferation of news stories. Pandemics are also a perennial subject of film, television, literature and online games and pandemic narrative...

Analysis of public health's growing interest in “vulnerability” has largely focused on health policy, with little interrogation of how vulnerability is being actively appropriated, countered, ignored or reworked by the publics whose health such policy is designed to protect. Once the assemblage of public health is understood as comprised of differe...

During the 2009 H1N1 pandemic, it was identified that women in the third trimester of pregnancy were particularly at risk of serious respiratory distress. At-risk women were advised to seek vaccination, avoid contact with anyone unwell, maintain hygiene routines and stop smoking. We examine this situation of emergent and intense risk produced at th...

Disclosure is a frequently used but rarely interrogated concept in health and social welfare. Abuse, disability, sexuality and health status can be ‘disclosed’ to peers and professionals, and on some occasions, disclosure is a requirement and not a choice. This innovative collection examines the new social and political implications of disclosure p...

Narrative research has become a catchword in the social sciences today, promising new fields of inquiry and creative solutions to persistent problems. This book brings together ideas about narrative from a variety of contexts across the social sciences and synthesizes understandings of the field. Rather than focusing on theory, it examines how narr...

This paper explores the ways gay men living with HIV talk about their identities in relationship to ideas concerning essentialism in the boarder context of biomedicalisation. Data were collected from 36 HIV positive gay men between 2001-2005 from two studies. All interview material was initially collected and analysed using broadly speaking themati...

For a few weeks in 2009 it was not certain whether the world faced a lethal influenza pandemic. As it turned out, the H1N1 pandemic was less severe than anticipated, though the infection did affect groups not usually susceptible to influenza. The deep uncertainties of this pandemic moment were associated with immense practical, scientific and polit...

This study presents an interpretative phenomenological analysis of the experiential accounts of HIV-positive gay men. Participants took part in open-ended interviews. Three key related recurrent themes are presented; ‘Disclosure, deliberation and the abject other’; ‘Disclosure, care and the valued other’; ‘Disclosure and intimate citizenship’. Thes...

This study presents an interpretative phenomenological analysis of the experiential accounts of HIV-positive gay men. Participants took part in open-ended interviews. Three key-related recurrent themes are presented: 'Disclosure, deliberation and the abject other'; 'Disclosure, care and the valued other' and 'Disclosure and intimate citizenship'. T...

Although a wide literature details the psychological impact of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) diagnosis, it predates the introduction of effective treatment for HIV (i.e. anti-retroviral therapies, ARTs). This article explores the psychological impact of HIV diagnosis in post-ART accounts. This is important, given the recent policy developments...

This paper explores the relation between internet technologies and social change with reference to the narratives of ordinary internet-users living in Melbourne, Australia. The argument developed here draws attention to the interviewee's imaginaries of being-in-the-world under internet-related change; imaginaries which are, at times, marked by a la...

This article develops the concept of biosocial pedagogy in HIV education for this era of expanding biomedical forms of HIV control. With reference to critical pedagogy and teaching and learning materials addressing HIV treatment and prevention, I explain how HIV education can problematize its own role in HIV control. I also discuss how educational...

This paper examines discourse on serodiscordant relationships in interviews with 16 HIV-positive and 3 HIV-negative gay men living in Scotland. Drawing on critiques concerning love, reason and HIV serostatus normativity, this paper supplies a much-needed insight into how gay men in serodiscordant relationships negotiate HIV prevention. Among other...

This article examines how pandemic influenza control policies interpellate the public. We analyse Australian pandemic control documents and key informant interviews, with reference to the H1N1 virus in 2009. Our analysis suggests that the episodic and uncertain features of pandemic influenza give control measures a pronounced tactical character. Th...

This book addresses the governance of the HIV and AIDS pandemic, with reference to the social aspects of technology and the technological mediation of the pandemic in international contexts. © Mark David McGregor Davis and Corinne Squire 2010. All rights reserved.

Sexuality is understood to alter over the lifecourse of the individual. In addition, sexuality is seen to be subject to generational, cultural and historical context and, as some would have it, self-management (Giddens, 1992). One of the ways of researching such changing and changeable sexuality has been through the sex survey. Of these, random-sam...

This is an extract from an interview regarding the implications of antiretroviral treatment (ART) for the risk of transmission in sexual intercourse. It comes from research I will consider in later parts of the chapter. The quotation concerns the idea that undetectable viral load, one of the desired effects of ART, implies that the risk of HIV tran...

The case studies presented in this volume have addressed HIV technologies as formations of the material, embodied, social and political in modes of engagement with the HIV epidemic. As argued throughout, this notion of HIV technologies is needed to grapple with the particularities of the HIV pandemic in the treatment possibility era. This approach...

Here, we address the governance of the HIV and AIDS pandemic with reference to the social aspects of technology in international contexts. The term 'technology' is used to encompass medical technologies such as HIV treatment, but also other ‘technologies’ of health care, including psychosocial and social interventions and communications media appli...

Exploring the implications of the internet and bio-technologies for intimate and sexual life, this book discusses the concept of citizenship in relation to the extension of public health through the internet, and reveals concerns that sexually transmitted infections and HIV are associated with such technologies.

The previous chapter explored the idea that public health governance can exploit technosexual visibility. In Chapter 5, I explored how public health governance tries to exert itself through various imperatives and how these articulate with bio-technologies. These chapters have therefore addressed public health governance and how it impinges on, or...

This chapter makes a case for I want to call technosexual visibility and its ramifications for public health governance. As I have discussed, depictions of internet-based sexuality often draw on the idea that the internet is dangerous because netizens can hide their identities. But at the same time, it is not easy to ignore how the internet makes s...

Increases in reported unsafe sex among gay men have been explained as resistance to HIV prevention, or most recently, with the idea that a hyper-individualization of sexual action contributes to the loss of sexual community. This turning in HIV prevention has come to focus on the sexual action of gay men with HIV through the frames of: sexual trans...

Using qualitative interviews with gay men with HIV and with reference to identity, expertise and HIV medical technologies, this article contributes to debate concerning the concept of risk reflexivity. Since the mid 1990s, people with HIV in the affluent, global North have had access to HIV treatment that substantially improves health. Recent resea...

The objective was to examine how many young men who have sex with men (MSM) meet their first sexual partner through the Internet and whether this has increased over time. In 2003, 2505 MSM surveyed on UK Internet sites completed a self-administered questionnaire. Data were analysed for 810 MSM who were under 30 years old at the time of the survey a...

The objectives of this study were to examine the extent to which HIV-positive gay men in London intentionally seek unprotected anal intercourse ("barebacking") and the contribution this makes to total sexual risk. In 2002 to 2003, HIV-positive gay men surveyed in an HIV outpatient clinic or on the Internet were asked whether they had intentionally...

Heterosexual women (n = 330), heterosexual men (n = 319) and gay men (n = 331) attending a London HIV-testing clinic in 2002-03 completed a confidential self-administered questionnaire concerning their sexual behaviour and use of the Internet for seeking sexual partners (response rate 70%). One-in-twenty (5%) heterosexual women and one-in-ten (10%)...

Highly Active Anti-Retroviral Treatment (HAART) has reduced death and morbidity among people with HIV. However, HAART is not always effective, can produce serious side-effects and implies uncertainty for patients. To address HAART-related uncertainty, 20 qualitative interviews were conducted with gay men with HIV in Glasgow and London. The intervie...