Allison Cavanagh – författare

For the student new to the study of technology and society, there are a bewildering array of claims and counter claims, representing a spectrum of theoretical, methodological and critical sensibilities in relation to the Internet. In this new book Allison Cavanagh evaluates the work in this area by:

For the student new to the study of technology and society, there are a bewildering array of claims and counter claims, representing a spectrum of theoretical, methodological and critical sensibilities in relation to the Internet. In this new book Allison Cavanagh evaluates the work in this area by:

This book provides an account of current work on letters to the editor from a range of different national, cultural, conceptual and methodological perspectives. Letters to the editor provide a window on the reflexive relationship between editorial and readership identities in historical and international contexts. They are a forum through which the personal and the political intersect, a space wherein the implications of contemporaneous events are worked out by citizens and public figures alike, and in which the meaning and significance of unfolding media narratives and events are interpreted and contested. They can also be used to understand the multiple and overlapping ways that particular issues recur over sometimes widely distinct periods. This collection brings together scholars who have helped open up letters to the editor as a resource for scholarship and whose work in this book continues to provide new insights into the relationship between journalism and its publics.

This book explores narratives of vaccine hesitancy using samples from the UK press, and looks at the ways these have changed between the 1950s and the present. The work draws on a variety of research instruments including semantic network analysis and analysis of metaphor to provide a rich description of anti-vaccine narratives in different historical periods. 

The work considers the ways that concerns about and resistance to inoculation were informed by cultural and social pressures in two case studies, firstly that of polio in the 1950s and secondly the so called ‘pertussis crisis’ of the 1970s, wherein a period of social activism and newspaper campaigning  led UK and US governments to offer compensation schemes for vaccine damaged children. The studies chosen provide a detailed comparison of the politics of childhood inoculation over two eras in the UK. Chapters also cover the use of metaphor and representational analysis in health communication, comparing ways in which the work of Moscovici, Sontag and other theorists can be used to provide complementary insights, and the affordances and concerns around the use of ‘big data’ analyses in historical work. The work also features discussion of the implications of the findings for approaches to more recent vaccination crisis points. This book argues that anti-vaccination narratives, far from showing a stable and coherent set of concerns, are highly mutable. The work compares anti-vaccination and conspiracy theory narratives, drawing out areas of continuity and schism.