Publications

Against the backdrop of rising populist movements and autocratic regimes worldwide, policy makers, publics, and academics are increasingly concerned about the negative impacts of mis- and disinformation on democracy. While there is debate about the actual share of fabricated content in online communication environments, such forms of information manipulation appear in many shapes and with varying degrees of deviation from facts. What unifies them is their use of narratives to distort public debate, sow division, and seed doubt in institutions. However, with increasing scholarly attention, the literature on information manipulation is becoming increasingly fragmented, calling for stronger integration. Particularly, different strands of research use either framing or narrative perspectives in their analyses. After reviewing essential forms of information manipulation and systematizing them on different levels of analysis, the paper addresses this fragmentation by proposing and testing a multilevel framework that integrates both framing and narrative perspectives on information manipulation. The framework was tested in an exploratory case study in the context of the 2024 European Parliament elections. Based on the results, the benefits and limitations of the framework are discussed. The overall aim of this paper is to add to the systematic use of terminology in the analysis of information manipulation phenomena.

In Zambia, religious nationalists exploit legal and policy ambiguities to construct abortion and LGBTI+ rights as un-Zambian and un-Christian. This delegitimization narrows the scope of sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) to family planning. Drawing on forty-five in-depth interviews with Zambian stakeholders and international aid officials, we argue that while these ambiguities constrain reproductive justice, they also allow activists to advance SRHR by building coalitions that connect advocacy for abortion rights, LGBTI+ rights, and reproductive justice to promote health service access and bodily autonomy for all. In Zambia and elsewhere, such activism and coalition building merit greater attention and support.

The De Gruyter Handbook of Digital Health and Society explores how digitalization is reconfiguring practices of health and medicine. Digitalisation requires health and medical practices to address and utilise the interrelated challenges posed by increased quantification (e.g., data-intensive medicine), ubiquitous connectivity (e.g., remote access to care providers), and the unprecedented power of algorithms (e.g., communicative AI). Developing important social scientific analyses of the contemporary sociotechnical configuration of health knowledge, therapeutic relationships and medical decision-making, the handbook puts forward theories and methods to inform the development, implementation and governance of Digital Health. It will therefore be an invaluable resource for shaping desirable futures in health and care.

Digital transformation is widely promoted as a solution to healthcare chal-lenges such as ageing populations, chronic diseases and pandemics. This has led to rapid advances in the field of digital health, driven primarily by the computer and health sciences, which are developing devices and interventions. However, digital transformation in healthcare is not always easy to implement. Repeated calls for digi-tal transformation and their technology-centric solutions fail to adequately address issues of implementation, adoption and unintended consequences. What is over-looked is the factor that moderates digital transformation, namely the society in which it takes place. It is important to recognise that society and social practices are not simply passive objects that can be transformed in a linear way. Instead, they are reflexive and responsive to experimentation and intervention. Designing and manag-ing digital transformation in healthcare therefore requires an understanding of soci-ety. The Handbook of Digital Health and Societybrings together leading social science perspectives – from sociology, media studies, STS, psychology, philosophy, political science and more – to explore the complex relationship between technology and soci-ety, and to shed light on the conditions under which digital transformation can be successful, ethical and deliver social value. The Handbook thus complements the dom-inant disciplines in the field of digital health and provides essential guidance for envi-sioning and developing appropriate and desirable solutions to current healthcare challenges.

The archaeology of war has often focused on combatants and weaponry, prioritising the conflicts themselves over their aftermath. Yet in today’s world, with ongoing and emerging wars, archaeology must also address the precarity and long-term consequences of armed conflict for all parties involved. This edited volume examines how the short- and long-term impacts of warfare appear in the archaeological record from prehistory to the medieval period. For the defeated, consequences may include poor diet, ill-health, physical trauma, and higher mortality – visible in bioarchaeological evidence. Victorious communities may benefit from plundered resources, leading to wealth and improved living conditions. Conflicts can also trigger migrations, whether through forced displacement or deportation, well-documented in historical texts but harder to trace in periods without written records. Finally, warfare can leave settlements and landscapes destroyed, rendering them less hospitable. Understanding the trauma of war requires examining its corporeal and material dimensions. This volume explores who gains and who suffers in the wake of conflict, through case studies from prehistoric Iberia, ancient Egypt and Nubia, Roman Britain and Pannonia, the Middle Danube “Barbaricum”, the Late Antique Balkans and eastern Mediterranean, Viking Scandinavia, and medieval Anatolia.

Subversive acts can resist systems of dominion through disoriented, peripheral practices and anarchist cosmologies. In Hobart, Tasmania, anarchist DJ Astro Labe head-butted Tony Abbott, former prime minister of Australia. His act of guerrilla theatre defies conventional frameworks and demands new interpretive tools.

In this article, I aver that Nada can offer us a privileged insight into a wide range of mental health conditions in the postwar period which afflicted both female and male characters. This biomedical motif problematizes prescribed gender roles of post-war Spain, as Carmen Laforet brings male and female mental illnesses into dialogue with gender and contemporaneous medical discourses. Nada is thus reinterpreted as a sensitive interpretation of both female and male mental health from the 1920s to the postwar period. which defies the social silence surrounding mental illnesses to induce readerly compassion for the afflicted characters.

Performing Waste offers groundbreaking insights into the vibrant interdisciplinary field of waste studies through the lens of performance and artistic practice. This pioneering collection examines how waste and wasting are performed across diverse media and genres, from Afrofuturist musical works to contemporary scrap art installations. Distinguished international scholars present original research using situated methodologies, including ethnographic approaches, to analyse compelling case studies that span global contexts. The volume explores eco-trauma and toxic kinship in artistic works, investigates the relationship between extractivism and knowledge production, and examines critical sites like the Polish-Belorussian border and e-waste processing in Ghana and Peru. By reframing familiar environmental narratives and introducing novel perspectives on waste agency, materiality, and performance, the collection challenges conventional understandings of our discarded materials and practices. Each contribution illuminates how waste performance can help us reimagine ecological relationships and envision alternative futures beyond extractivist paradigms. This volume is an essential reading for students and scholars in environmental humanities, posthumanist theory, decolonial studies, eco-arts, media studies, and performance studies, as well as anyone concerned with creative responses to our global waste crisis.

In this debate piece, we examine representations of postmenopausal motherhood in print media and online content of private clinics in India to show how the visual vocabulary of assisted reproductive technology (ART) reifies patriarchal logics of motherhood through a dance of science and spectacle. In particular, we draw on Franklin’s (2013a) notion of ‘embryo watching’ and Thompson’s (2005) ‘ontological choreography’ to argue how biomedical imaging technologies curate embodied encounters of ART and local-moral worlds where gerontological reproductive futures can be imaged and imagined. Crucially, we illuminate the ambivalent biopolitics of this (media) framing, where older women’s bodies are simultaneously expressed through the promissory language of fertility and an erasure of sexuality. Ultimately, keeping in mind the current decade (2021–2030) as one focused on determinants of healthy ageing, this article sheds light on the policy blind spot of a persistent neglect of the sexual and reproductive health of older women in India.

Senescence in fiction has been rarely studied in the cultural gerontological tradition in India. While later life associated with intergenerational authority, or enhanced religiosity or as a cultural process of worldly renunciation, have been themes in the phenomenological corpus of gerontology in India, studying the aging feminine body has remained outside the intellectual sensibilities of this field. In this paper, we analyze the short story, Boodhi Kaki (old aunt) by noted Hindi and Urdu writer, Munshi Premchand (1880-1936) to explore the cultural construction of the abject, an ambiguous liminal stage that is distinct from notions of “Third” or “Fourth” age in life-course studies. As such, by focusing on food and (a devouring) appetite of the older female protagonist, we complicate the entanglements of desire and disgust in aging studies. Ultimately, we explore the ansgressive potential of the abject as a self-reclaiming device that upends cultural understandings of age(ing) and gender.