Journal of Sociology

This editorial explores how misinformation is expressed across a range of health practices and contexts.

Health misinformation on social media has largely been examined from a harms-focused perspective, with scholars seeking to identify what impacts misinformation has on public health and a popular focus on removing it from platforms. The act of debunking is one response wherein misinformation is corrected with knowledge from scientific sources. To date, little research exists examining how experts and the public engage with misinformation beyond a focus on harm. Using Karen Barad's concept of diffraction, we examine the iterative relationships between misinformation, obstetrician-gynaecologists (OBGYNs) and the educational content they generate on the short-form video platform TikTok. Though misinformation and debunking content have been seen as oppositional, they are brought into productive dialogue with one another using diffractive techniques and platform affordances. We conclude that through the educational content created by the OBGYNs of TikTok, misinformation becomes diffractively integrated into debunking content and is generative of new knowledge, rather than cleansed away.

This article draws on Epstein's theorisations of the ‘ideal’ of sexual health and wellbeing to argue that young people's access to digital sexual health content should not be understood primarily as a process of ‘information seeking’. Where digital practices are too narrowly viewed through a lens of information seeking and transmission, there may be an excessive focus on whether sexual health content is ‘factual’ – overlooking the question of whether it is meaningful in specific cultural contexts. We link contemporary digital sexual health cultures to the complex – and politicised – histories of popular mediated sexual health communication that underpin them. Exploring alternative theoretical frames – including pornographic vernaculars, influencer pedagogies, media as ritual, and situated peripheral learning in digital communities – we conclude that redefining and refocusing dominant understandings of ‘good’ sexual health content may generate new and productive strategies for engaging with marginal and disaffected digital sexual cultures.

This article asks: ‘To what extent can health professional influencers function as health pedagogues, educating their audiences and protecting public health in an era of digital misinformation?’ The article teases out that question by applying Content Analysis and Framing Analysis to a selection of TikTok and Instagram posts by Dr Michael Mrozinski, a Scottish general practitioner who is based in Australia. The posts seek to debunk online misinformation and provide facts regarding COVID-19. Mrozinski's social media content exemplifies what the article terms ‘public health pedagogy’ (PHP) – pedagogy that is informed by public health principles and that is undertaken outside traditional educational institutions. The article also asks: ‘How exactly does Mrozinski respond to misinformation actors and to what extent does this diminish the effectiveness of his PHP?’ The article investigates whether Mrozinski's hostility towards these actors actually invokes stereotypes of medical experts as elitist and uncaring. Those stereotypes are commonly expounded by misinformation and conspiracy actors.

For the wellness industry, email communication, albeit mundane, remains an essential practice even as wellness entrepreneurs embrace newer digital technologies. Drawing on ongoing insights from a larger Australian digital ethnographic project, I explore how these ‘wellness emails’ – electronic mail communication (outside of social media) that typically circulate wellness-related content through automated email list subscriptions – promise an always-ready, abundant space for transforming bodies and optimising health. These emails teach alternative bodily temporalities, distinct from the inhospitable biomedical time of mainstream healthcare, yet also employ time-critical marketing tactics and stories to drive attention, where recipients are encouraged both to not miss out on opportunities but also to respect their own ‘divine timing’. Such temporal flexibility of wellness culture, and its promise of abundance, contributes to its global expansion, where email offers personal and marketised engagement and, critically, a potential escape from social media censorship and public health scrutiny.

This article traces how misinformation occurs and is negotiated in What I Eat In A Day (WIEIAD) videos. Data were collected from 84 WIEIAD videos across 59 YouTube accounts. Our discourse analysis demonstrated that misinformation is presented in ways that invoke expertise, scientific credibility and personal experience, making it more difficult to identify and respond to. Our analysis illustrates how misinformation arises in seemingly mundane sites of discourse and argues that identifying and responding to misinformation is not a binary task. The WIEIAD genre demonstrates the complexity of contemporary wellness discourses and their broader role in health and risk management, which results in the (re)circulation of misinformation. The tension between the sensory and the rational in WIEIAD videos highlights the complexities present in how misinformation, wellness and health are entangled on social media.

This article explores the political meaning of the interconnected anti-vaccine and anti-lockdown protest movements that have emerged in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. A range of academics and commentators have argued that such protests should be understood in terms of a dangerous resurgence of far-right populism, one that is fuelled by misinformation and extremist ideologies. This article tests such a framing by engaging with recent scholarship on the ‘anti-political’ – the theorisation of the growing inability for political action to occur other than in opposition to the political system itself. Against the conventional reading of the protests as fundamentally political, this article looks at recent anthropological work on ‘conspirituality’ in order to investigate how the aesthetic and performative dimensions of such protests may be key to understanding contemporary anti-vaccine thought and action.

In this article, we analyse how domestic violence (DV) is understood and experienced among immigrant Ethiopian women in Melbourne, as well as the different conditions that contribute to their experiences of abuse and their responses to it. To do this, we draw on 20 interviews with participants, 7 of whom experienced intimate partner violence. Demonstrating that immigrant Ethiopian women find themselves in a social context with a set of values and understandings of family and DV that differs from their own, we argue that their responses to DV shows their selective acceptance of these values and state interventions. In exploring these themes, we contribute to the discussion about minority women's voices, values and priorities in relation to violence in the migration context. Our findings also highlight the limitations of mainstream approaches to DV, illustrating the extent to which interventions are constructed through reference to western perceptions of individuality and white feminism.

Responses to the Covid-19 pandemic include the generation of new norms and shifting expectations about everyday, ordinary behaviour, management of the self, and social interaction. Central to the amalgam of new norms is the way information and instructions are communicated, often in the form of simple images and icons in posters and signs that are widespread in public settings. This article combines two sociological concerns – social control and visual research – to investigate the ways social interaction is being recalibrated during the pandemic. It focuses on some of the imagery relied on in public information about the coronavirus and investigates the form and content of various signs, instructions, and notices for their normative underpinnings, their advice and directives which attempt to modify and regulate diverse activities.

The everyday practices and socio-cultural identities of migrant youth have become a focal point of contemporary sociological research in Western countries of immigration. This article engages with the concept of transcultural capital to frame the possibilities and opportunities embodied in young migrants’ multi-layered identities and cross-cultural competencies in the context of an increasingly interconnected and diverse world. By re-conceptualising diversity and difference as agentic, transformational capitals to be valued, fostered and mobilised, this transcultural approach brings to the fore the multitude of skills, networks and knowledge that migrant youth access and develop through multiple cultural repertoires. Drawing on the narratives of migrant youth in Melbourne (Australia), this article argues that access to different – and not necessarily oppositional – cultural systems opens up a space for understanding the ability of migrant youth to instigate, negotiate and maintain valuable socio-cultural connections in ways that recognise, disrupt and transform social hierarchies.

Our sociological knowledge base about plastic surgery has been predominantly constructed in free market contexts, leaving uncertainties as to how sociological theory around agency, identity, and structure apply in the context of publicly funded plastic surgeries. We draw on narratives of Australian women while waiting for abdominoplasty in the public system and recounting their post-surgical realities to understand the relational, dependent and interdependent agency–structure networks in which women's bodies, affects, lives and eligibility requirements are enmeshed. We found women adopted a ‘deserving’ identity to help them claim and enact agency as they felt and navigated the layered structures that govern publicly funded abdominoplasty in Australia, and theorise how this might influence unfolding patterns of social life. We explicate the importance of locating women's lived experiences of medical (dys)function vis-à-vis the sociocultural histories of medicine, health, gender and citizenship that give rise to publicly funded healthcare.