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In this article, we examine the current management of sexually transmitted infections (STIs), in the context of rising antimicrobial resistance (AMR), through the lens of ‘treatment cultures’. Prevailing treatment cultures—including the prominence of syndromic care for STIs—foster certain possibilities and foreclose others, with important consequences for countering AMR. Drawing on qualitative interviews with STI professionals, experts and industry representatives, we unpack these stakeholders’ accounts of STI treatment cultures, drawing out the importance of socio‐historical (i.e. taboo and stigma), political–economic (i.e. perceptions of significance, profit‐making and prioritisation) and subjective (i.e. patient contexts and reflexivity) dimensions therein. In developing this critical account of how treatment cultures are formed, reproduced and indeed resisted, we reveal how such discourses and practices render the reining in of AMR and shifting antibiotic use difficult, and yet, how productive engagement remains key to any proposed solutions. As such, the article contributes to our understanding of AMR as a highly diversified field, through our exploration of the bio‐social dimensions of resistance as they relate to the case of STIs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Normative time frameworks obscure the ontological ambiguities of lived time, particularly in relation to illness and death. These forms of ambiguous lived time constitute what we call ‘shadow time’ – the unnoticed and the unknowable in our dominant temporal order. We examine what we call ‘diagnostic time’, ‘prognostic time’, ‘terminal time’ and ‘mourning time’ as shades of shadow time that elude the ordering of time that orders life. A critical stance to temporality is necessary, we argue, in order to recognise the regulatory imperatives of normative time, to mark the slippages between the demands of normative time and how time is often lived (out) and, importantly, to do justice to those living in the complicated ontological ambiguities of lived shadow time – where we see the intricate folding of life and death [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mental ill‐health is a serious and growing problem among university students in Australia. Within this cohort, international students are particularly vulnerable. International students in Australia have fewer social rights than domestic students and are at elevated risk of social isolation, exploitation in employment, precarious housing, financial insecurity, and racism and discrimination. When mental health challenges arise, international students are also less likely than their domestic counterparts to access support services. Against the backdrop of this escalating problem, this article presents a critical analysis of Australian universities' policy approaches to international student mental health. We ask: (a) How many universities have such policies publicly available, and (b) how do these policies understand and seek to address the problem of international student distress? Drawing on a documentary analysis of publicly available university mental health strategies, we find that—in the comparatively rare cases where such documents exist—international students' mental ill‐health is generally framed in these documents as an individual concern, placing the onus on individual students to develop “resilience” and/or seek out help. Leveraging theoretical insights concerning the collective production of (mental) health and illness, we caution that this individualisation of student distress naturalises and depoliticises the logics of financial exploitation and neglect that contribute to many international students' mental health problems to begin with. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The lungs serve as a site of interchange between the bodily and environmental, an interface between the internal and external world, enacted through breath. We draw on the primacy of this exchange to explore the complexities of living with lung cancer amidst the enduring social challenge of stigma and the advent of ‘targeted therapies’ at the cutting edge of precision medicine. Lung cancer’s association with smoking and resulting stigmatisation of those with lung cancer has been well documented – positioning those with lung cancer as failed subjects of a biopolitics of lifestyle. However, recent developments in ‘precision medicine’ have drawn attention to alternate, genetic causes of lung cancer, disrupting easy equivalences between deviant cells (malignancy) and deviant conduct (smoking). Despite this, and drawing on interviews with 32 people receiving targeted therapy for lung cancer in Australia, we identify enduring resonances of deviance and stigma which still foreground individual lifestyle and blame, even for those – like many participants in this study – who have never smoked. Even in the context of uncertain causal origins and genetic mutations, the stigma of lung cancer and the figure of ‘the smoker’ as an object of abjection and disavowal persists. We find Alaimo’s concept of transcorporeality instructive for moving away from this biopolitics of lifestyle, toward greater recognition of the collective, though unequal, conditions of ‘carcinogenic capitalism’ in which we all must live and breathe. In turn, our analysis of the specificities of lung cancer may inform broader sociological approaches to tackle stigma at a structural level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although a diagnosis of a life‐limiting cancer is likely to evoke emotions, such as fear, panic and anxiety, for some people it can also provide an opportunity to live life differently. This article is based on research undertaken in Aotearoa New Zealand on the topic of exceptional cancer trajectories. Eighty‐one participants who had been identified as living with a cancer diagnosis longer than clinically expected were interviewed, along with 25 people identified by some of the participants as supporters in their journey. For some participants the diagnosis provided the opportunity to rethink their lives, to undertake lifestyle and consumption changes, to be culturally adventurous, to take up new skills, to quit work and to change relationships with others. The concepts of biographical disruption and posttraumatic growth are considered in relation to these accounts, and it is argued that the event of a cancer diagnosis can give license for people to breach social norms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]