Katherine A. Foss – författare

American society centers on individualism, celebrating personal choice even at the expense of collective progress. As part of this emphasis on agency, Americans value freedom for health decisions, and individual health professionals and consumers are held responsible for the nation’s health, often at the expense of improving the overall healthcare system. Such individualistic discourse, disseminated and reinforced through American media, has created resistance and hostility toward health policy initiatives such as the Affordable Care Act and other legislation aimed to improve American healthcare. Television and Health Responsibility in an Age of Individualism examines the relationship between entertainment and health responsibility in the United States. Through the analysis of contemporary television medical dramas, Foss explores how these media texts help shape and perpetuate ideologies that have and continue to encourage resistance to healthcare reform that shifts responsibility away from individuals to government and other institutions.

Beyond Princess Culture: Gender and Children’s Marketing explores the impact of a post-princess space, examining potential agency and empowerment in the products’ users while acknowledging that at least some alternatives continue to perpetuate components of the rigidly gender-coded princess culture. This book collectively critiques the commodification of the post-princess child consumer through analysis of historical and contemporary toys, video games, clothing, websites, and other popular culture phenomena. Guided by theories from feminist and gender studies, Beyond Princess Culture demonstrates how the marketing of children’s products has and continues to perpetuate and challenge hegemonic notions of gender, race, ethnicity, ability, and other positions of intersectionality, as situated in the social, economic, and historical contexts.

Beyond Princess Culture: Gender and Children’s Marketing explores the impact of a post-princess space, examining potential agency and empowerment in the products’ users while acknowledging that at least some alternatives continue to perpetuate components of the rigidly gender-coded princess culture. This book collectively critiques the commodification of the post-princess child consumer through analysis of historical and contemporary toys, video games, clothing, websites, and other popular culture phenomena. Guided by theories from feminist and gender studies, Beyond Princess Culture demonstrates how the marketing of children’s products has and continues to perpetuate and challenge hegemonic notions of gender, race, ethnicity, ability, and other positions of intersectionality, as situated in the social, economic, and historical contexts.

Graduate school is an important and confusing time, filled with many questions about the inner-workings of academia and decisions students must make about their futures. The Graduate Student Guidebook: From Orientation to Tenure Track offers an overview of this experience, featuring expert advice on the many different steps and challenges encountered in master’s and doctoral programs. In the current academic climate, initial decisions—like choosing an advisor—critically shape future opportunities. Students need a consistent, reliable, and up-to-date resource. In this authoritative guide, faculty from various universities, positions, and backgrounds offer sage advice, responding to concerns identified by graduate student members themselves. Moving through the text, readers learn about the transition from undergrad to graduate-level expectations, special considerations for students of marginalized groups, graduate assistantships, the importance of key decisions, comprehensive exams, writing the thesis or dissertation, publishing, conferences, navigating the job search, and making a career in a tenure track position.

Graduate school is an important and confusing time, filled with many questions about the inner-workings of academia and decisions students must make about their futures. The Graduate Student Guidebook: From Orientation to Tenure Track offers an overview of this experience, featuring expert advice on the many different steps and challenges encountered in master’s and doctoral programs. In the current academic climate, initial decisions—like choosing an advisor—critically shape future opportunities. Students need a consistent, reliable, and up-to-date resource. In this authoritative guide, faculty from various universities, positions, and backgrounds offer sage advice, responding to concerns identified by graduate student members themselves. Moving through the text, readers learn about the transition from undergrad to graduate-level expectations, special considerations for students of marginalized groups, graduate assistantships, the importance of key decisions, comprehensive exams, writing the thesis or dissertation, publishing, conferences, navigating the job search, and making a career in a tenure track position.

When an epidemic strikes, media outlets are central to how an outbreak is framed and understood. While reporters construct stories intended to inform the public and convey essential information from doctors and politicians, news narratives also serve as historical records, capturing sentiments, responses, and fears throughout the course of the epidemic.Constructing the Outbreak demonstrates how news reporting on epidemics communicates more than just information about pathogens; rather, prejudices, political agendas, religious beliefs, and theories of disease also shape the message. Analyzing seven epidemics spanning more than two hundred years -- from Boston's smallpox epidemic and Philadelphia's yellow fever epidemic in the eighteenth century to outbreaks of diphtheria, influenza, and typhoid in the early twentieth century -- Katherine A. Foss discusses how shifts in journalism and medicine influenced the coverage, preservation, and fictionalization of different disease outbreaks. Each case study highlights facets of this interplay, delving into topics such as colonization, tourism, war, and politics. Through this investigation into what has been preserved and forgotten in the collective memory of disease, Foss sheds light on current health care debates, like vaccine hesitancy.

When an epidemic strikes, media outlets are central to how an outbreak is framed and understood. While reporters construct stories intended to inform the public and convey essential information from doctors and politicians, news narratives also serve as historical records, capturing sentiments, responses, and fears throughout the course of the epidemic.Constructing the Outbreak demonstrates how news reporting on epidemics communicates more than just information about pathogens; rather, prejudices, political agendas, religious beliefs, and theories of disease also shape the message. Analyzing seven epidemics spanning more than two hundred years -- from Boston's smallpox epidemic and Philadelphia's yellow fever epidemic in the eighteenth century to outbreaks of diphtheria, influenza, and typhoid in the early twentieth century -- Katherine A. Foss discusses how shifts in journalism and medicine influenced the coverage, preservation, and fictionalization of different disease outbreaks. Each case study highlights facets of this interplay, delving into topics such as colonization, tourism, war, and politics. Through this investigation into what has been preserved and forgotten in the collective memory of disease, Foss sheds light on current health care debates, like vaccine hesitancy.

When health authorities quarantined guests aboard the Diamond Princess on February 5, 2020, the cruise ship abruptly shifted from a dream vacation vessel to a public health nightmare. Over the next three weeks, 712 passengers tested positive for coronavirus, with fourteen deaths, and the ship outbreak quickly became the largest cluster of cases outside of China. Guests began to routinely share quarantine updates on social media, ranging from the quality of the ship’s food to their sense of imprisonment. These Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok accounts became a key source of information for news outlets like the Associated Press, and they helped to set the tone for how the media would cover and frame the pandemic for the next several years.Unlike past outbreaks, epidemics, and pandemics, COVID-19 emerged in a 21st-century digital landscape of instant communication and abundant online platforms, with older models of news and entertainment media mingling with new types of citizen-produced content. In Capturing COVID, Katherine A. Foss makes sense of how this contemporary media landscape shaped the public’s knowledge and perceptions of the new pandemic. The book focuses on crucial media moments, including the initial reporting from Wuhan; news and social media content on the Diamond Princess quarantine; stories of inequality, stigma, and injustice; narratives of the vaccine rollout; and representations of pandemic life in popular culture. Drawing on press releases, interviews, websites, blogs, social media posts, and other publicly available materials, and guided by critical media analysis, Foss illuminates how this new digital era profoundly shaped the progression of the pandemic. This media landscape kept people informed and connected, but also led to the politicization of the virus, rampant mis/disinformation, and stigmatizing messaging that contributed to public distrust and division. Capturing COVID deftly helps make sense of the entire affair.

When health authorities quarantined guests aboard the Diamond Princess on February 5, 2020, the cruise ship abruptly shifted from a dream vacation vessel to a public health nightmare. Over the next three weeks, 712 passengers tested positive for coronavirus, with fourteen deaths, and the ship outbreak quickly became the largest cluster of cases outside of China. Guests began to routinely share quarantine updates on social media, ranging from the quality of the ship’s food to their sense of imprisonment. These Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok accounts became a key source of information for news outlets like the Associated Press, and they helped to set the tone for how the media would cover and frame the pandemic for the next several years.Unlike past outbreaks, epidemics, and pandemics, COVID-19 emerged in a 21st-century digital landscape of instant communication and abundant online platforms, with older models of news and entertainment media mingling with new types of citizen-produced content. In Capturing COVID, Katherine A. Foss makes sense of how this contemporary media landscape shaped the public’s knowledge and perceptions of the new pandemic. The book focuses on crucial media moments, including the initial reporting from Wuhan; news and social media content on the Diamond Princess quarantine; stories of inequality, stigma, and injustice; narratives of the vaccine rollout; and representations of pandemic life in popular culture. Drawing on press releases, interviews, websites, blogs, social media posts, and other publicly available materials, and guided by critical media analysis, Foss illuminates how this new digital era profoundly shaped the progression of the pandemic. This media landscape kept people informed and connected, but also led to the politicization of the virus, rampant mis/disinformation, and stigmatizing messaging that contributed to public distrust and division. Capturing COVID deftly helps make sense of the entire affair.

This book centers on the role of media in shaping public perceptions of breastfeeding. Drawing from magazines, doctors’ office materials, parenting books, television, websites, and other media outlets, Katherine A. Foss explores how historical and contemporary media often undermine breastfeeding efforts with formula marketing and narrow portrayals of nursing women and their experiences. Foss argues that the media’s messages play an integral role in setting the standard of public knowledge and attitudes toward breastfeeding, as she traces shifting public perceptions of breastfeeding and their corresponding media constructions from the development of commercial formula through contemporary times. This analysis demonstrates how attributions of blame have negatively impacted public health approaches to breastfeeding, thus confronting the misperception that breastfeeding, and the failure to breastfeed, rests solely on the responsibility of an individual mother.