We see it all the time: organizations strive to persuade the public to change beliefs or behavior through expensive, expansive media campaigns. Designers painstakingly craft clear, resonant, and culturally sensitive messaging that will motivate people to buy a product, support a cause, vote for a candidate, or take active steps to improve their health. But once these campaigns leave the controlled environments of focus groups, advertising agencies, and stakeholder meetings to circulate, the public interprets and distorts the campaigns in ways their designers never intended or dreamed. In Best Laid Plans, Terence E. McDonnell explains why these attempts at mass persuasion often fail so badly.             McDonnell argues that these well-designed campaigns are undergoing “cultural entropy”: the process through which the intended meanings and uses of cultural objects fracture into alternative meanings, new practices, failed interactions, and blatant disregard. Using AIDS media campaigns in Accra, Ghana, as its central case study, the book walks readers through best-practice, evidence-based media campaigns that fall totally flat. Female condoms are turned into bracelets, AIDS posters become home decorations, red ribbons fade into pink under the sun—to name a few failures. These damaging cultural misfires are not random. Rather, McDonnell makes the case that these disruptions are patterned, widespread, and inevitable—indicative of a broader process of cultural entropy.

Product Description: HIV/AIDS is a global health crisis of unprecedented proportions. Afflicting millions worldwide, its social, political, economic, and ethical dimensions have rendered explicit the vast inequalities of our «negatively globalized planet»...read more

Product Description: Offering a comprehensive analysis of mediated representations of global pandemics, this book engages with the construction, management, and classification of difference in the global context of a pandemic, to address what it means - culturally, politically, and economically - to live in an infected, diseased body...read more

Product Description: Broadcasting the Pandemic tells the story of a South African television show, Beat It! Created during the aspirational years of the political transition in which the broadcast media were poised to democratize the airwaves, Beat It! was first screened on public television in 1999 and developed into one of the most powerful health education initiatives in contemporary history...read more

Product Description: This collection of essays provides a provocative critique of leadership on HIV/AIDS in Africa from the 1980s to the present. The book examines the rhetoric on HIV/AIDS which has influenced culture and behavior, service delivery, policy, the design of national interventions, and the varied success of different countries in containing the pandemic...read more

Another collection of tales about the pirate's widow who has a treasure chest of cures for the various childhood maladies

Reflecting the current state of research into the communication aspects of HIV/AIDS, this volume explores AIDS-related communication scholarship, moving forward from the 1992 publication AIDS: A Communication Perspective. Editors Timothy Edgar, Seth M. Noar, and Vicki S. Freimuth have developed this up-to-date collection to focus on today’s key communication issues in the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Chapters herein examine the interplay of the messages individuals receive about AIDS at the public level as well as the messages exchanged between individuals at the interpersonal level. Acknowledging how the face of HIV/AIDS has changed since 1992, the volume promotes the perspective that an understanding of effective communication through both mediated and interpersonal channels is essential to winning the continued battle against AIDS. Issues addressed here include: Social stigma associated with the disease, social support and those living with HIV/AIDS, and the current state of HIV testing Parent–child discussions surrounding HIV/AIDS and safer sexual behavior, and cultural sensitivity relating to developing HIV prevention and sex education programs The effectiveness of health campaigns to impact attitudes, norms, and behavior, as well as the current state of entertainment education and its ability to contribute to HIV prevention News media coverage of HIV/AIDS and the impact of the agenda-setting function on public opinion and policy making Health literacy and its importance to the health and well-being of those undergoing HIV treatment. The role of technological innovations, most notably the Internet, used for both prevention interventions as well as risky behavior The volume also includes exemplars that showcase the diversity of approaches to health communication used to combat the HIV/AIDS epidemic. These cases include interpersonal and mass communication mediums; traditional along with new media and technology; research by academics and practitioners; individual as well as community-based approaches; work based in the United States and internationally; and campaigns directed at at-risk, HIV- positive, as well as general populations. With new topics, new contributors, and a broadened scope, this book goes beyond a revision of the 1992 volume to reflect the current state of communication research on HIV/AIDS across key contexts. It is designed for academics, researchers, practitioners, and students in health communication, health psychology, and other areas of AIDS research. As a unique examination of communication research, it makes an indelible contribution to the growing knowledge base of communication approaches to combating HIV/AIDS.

Health communication scholars both in the US and abroad, explore media-related aspects of AIDS. The books consensus is that whether that media is print, electronic, and/or visual, they all lie at the heart of understanding the messages we have, or perhaps have not, received about AIDS.

Activism and Marginalization in the AIDS Crisis shows readers how the advent of HIV-disease has brought into question the utility of certain forms of “activism” as they relate to understanding and fighting the social impacts of disease. This informative and powerful book is centrally concerned about the ways in which institutionally governed social constructions of HIV/AIDS affect policy and public images of the disease more so than activist efforts. It asserts that an accounting of the power institutional structures have over the dominant social constructions of HIV disease is fundamental to adequate forms of present and future AIDS activism. Chapters in Activism and Marginalization in the AIDS Crisis demonstrate how, despite what is thought of as the “successful activism” of the past decade, the claims of the HIV-positive are still being ignored, still being marginalized, and still being administratively “handled” and exploited even as the plight of those who find themselves HIV-positive worsens. Although chapters reject the assertion that activism has been a highly effective remedy to HIV-positive voicelessness, authors do not deny that activists have been vocal, but that they continue to be ignored despite their vocality.Contributors in Activism and Marginalization in the AIDS Crisis offer numerous examples of institutional control and demonstrate that institutional structures, and not activists, are controlling the public meaning of HIV-related issues. Readers learn how messages about HIV/AIDS are produced, negotiated, modified, and sustained through institutional mechanisms that serve mostly institutional interests rather than those of the HIV-positive. In gaining an understanding of these issues, readers will begin to learn how to modify and strengthen activist efforts with valuable insight on: the lack of HIV-positive voices in mainstream news portrayals of HIV/AIDS research on constructions of HIV-disease at the state government level social constructions and how they affect HIV/AIDS policy the political construction of AIDS and interest-based struggles the emergent “bio-politics” of HIV and homosexuality in the U.S. how institutional power works to govern public understanding of HIV diseaseInstitutional structures are defined in this book as groups engaged in and defined by the production of various “truths” which sustain them. Institutional power may be defined as the capacity to regulate, constrain, and disseminate versions of “truth.” Activism and Marginalization in the AIDS Crisis reveals how HIV activist groups have been outmaneuvered when it comes to the production and dissemination of various “truths” about HIV/AIDS by institutional structures more deeply steeped in social legitimacy and which have a superior capacity for message dissemination.HIV/AIDS activists, HIV-positive persons and those with AIDS, HIV/AIDS educators, public and institutional policymakers, health professionals, and the general public will find this book essential to understanding the social constructions of HIV/AIDS, how these affect HIV/AIDS-related policy and public opinion, and how to begin to cipher through the plethora of information to find and promote the “truth.” (view table of contents)

An updated edition of this essential work.Since its initial publication, Policing Desire has proved to be an unparalleled analysis of "the cacophony of voices which sounds through every institution of our society on the subject of AIDS". For the third edition Simon Watney has provided a new preface, a compelling new concluding essay, and a directory for AIDS information that includes electronic resources."A far-reaching analysis of images of AIDS and homosexuality in the media.... In Policing Desire, Simon Watney called the media on its own game, and the media actually changed its coverage of AIDS and queer issues". Voice Literary Supplement"Simon Watney's Policing Desire is essential reading for anyone who wants to press the question of how the media represents AIDS ... it will stand as a great work of criticism written from the trenches". New York Native"A landmark work in AIDS analysis because of the combination of emotional urgency and analytical insight that it manifests". American Book Review

Product Description: AIDS, Communication, and Empowerment examines the cultural construction of gay men in light of discourse used in the media’s messages about HIV/AIDS--messages often represented as educational, scientific, and informational but which are, in fact, politically charged...read more

Product Description: Camcorder AIDS activism is a prime example of a new form of political expression—an outburst of committed, low-budget, community-produced, political video work made possible by new accessible technologies. As Alexandra Juhasz looks at this phenomenon—why and how video has become the medium for so much AIDS activism—she also tries to make sense of the bigger picture: How is this work different from mainstream television? How does it alter what we think of the media’s form and function? The result is an eloquent and vital assessment of the role media activism plays in the development of community identity and self-empowerment...read more

Product Description: Unstable Frontiers was first published in 1994. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions...read more

Since 1981, AIDS has had an enormous impact upon the popular imagination. Few other diseases this century have been greeted with quite the same fear, loathing, and prejudice against those who develop it. The mass media, and in particular, the news media, have played a vital part in "making sense" of AIDS. This volume takes an interdisciplinary perspective, combining cultural studies, history of medicine, and contemporary social theory to examine AIDS reporting. There have been three major themes dominating coverage: the "gay-plague" dominant in the early 1980s, panic-stricken visions of the end of the world as AIDS was said to pose a threat to everyone, in the late 1980s; and a growing routinising of coverage in the 1990s. This book lays bare the sub-textual ideologies giving meaning to AIDS news reports, including anxieties about pollution and contagion, deviance, bodily control, the moral meanings of risk, the valorisation of drugs and medical science. Drawing together the work of cultural and politicaltheorists, sociologists and historians who have written about medicine, disease and the body, as well as that of theorists in Europe and the USA who have focused their attention specificaiiy on AIDS, this book explores the wide theoretical debate about the importance of language in the social construction of illness and disease. This text offers insights into the sociocultural context in which attitudes towards people with HIV or AIDS and people's perceptions of risk from HIV infection are developed and the responses of governments to the AIDS epidemic are formulated.

Product Description: A decade after AIDS was first recognized, the simple idea that education is the most effective weapon to prevent infection remains valid. This is true because AIDS will not disappear, just as the majority of infectious diseases have not disappeared, even those for which effective methods of treatment and prevention already exist...read more

Product Description: A decade after AIDS was first recognized, the simple idea that education is the most effective weapon to prevent infection remains valid. This is true because AIDS will not disappear, just as the majority of infectious diseases have not disappeared, even those for which effective methods of treatment and prevention already exist...read more

Product Description: Whenever AIDS seemed to pose a threat to "the general population" (i.e., non-intravenous-drug-using heterosexuals), the U.S. news media gave the epidemic prominent attention, argues Kinsella. But for the most part, he finds, the media avoided or trivialized the AIDS story in its early years, and even today betrays homophobic bias and a head-in-the-sand attitude...read more