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Projects The Medicine and Media Project
Our attention will be drawn to various medical intersections, especially those dealing with the pharmaceutical imaging of psychosis, obesity and psychotropic elixirs; the politics of body exits: the televising of euthanasia and other disappearing acts; media representations of the mentally ill; representations of the nurse and the politics of gender identity; men in white on TV; driving around America and billboards of managed care; medical monsters and perversions in film and media; healing images and visual histories of scientific medicine; dissecting the health professional; technologies of transformation: the digitized body and ideologies of disease; and redesigning the BRAVO body in the age of medialization.
Our goal is to understand how these constructions reflect current ideological beliefs and values and how epistemological or ideological mechanisms create public knowledge and policy about health care and medical practices.
As a community we want to use technology to better understand how different representations of medicine and health become consumerized or commercially made "true" and "essential" to "good" health, by way of various political, rhetorical, semiotic and economic practices. Knowing how media participates in the health industry may help us better assess its role in determining social perceptions, behaviors and policies related to health and the medical sciences.
We do not want to simply demonstrate that media affects perceptions of medicine and health, but rather to explore how medicine and media operate ideologically. Hopefully our effort will allow us to disentangle media and medical rhetoric to better understand the sociology of medical issues. Ultimately we hope to shape public policy and to serve the public by producing knowledge—in the form of an national repository—that meets individual, community, national and global health needs. The purpose of this study then is not to be exclusively academic—to show that there is an ideological content driving the medical industry and media representation of medicine—but rather to get out into the streets and better understand how and why that medical content is produced, hyped and consumed and secondly, to provide information to the public that meets their health needs.
Support for this project has been provided in the form of a seed grant from the Institute for Humanities Research (http://www.asu.edu/ihr).
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