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Background: Visual technologies are central to youth culture and are often the preferred communication means of adolescents. Although these tools can be beneficial in fostering relations, adolescents' use of visual technologies and social media also raises ethical concerns. Aims: We explored how school public health nurses identify and resolve the ethical challenges involved in the use of visual technologies in health dialogues with adolescents. Research design: This is a qualitative study utilizing data from focus group discussions. Participants and research context: We conducted focus group discussions using two semi-structured discussion guides with seven groups of public health nurses (n = 40) working in Norwegian school health services. The data were collected during January and October 2016. Discussions were audio recorded, transcribed, and coded into themes and subthemes using systematic text condensation. Ethical considerations: The leader of the public health nursing service who agreed to provide access for the study and the Norwegian Center for Research Data that reviewed and approved the study. All participants gave informed consent. Findings: In adolescents' use of visual materials with public health nurses, ethical concerns were raised regarding suicide ideations, socially unacceptable content, violation of privacy, and presentations of possible child neglect. The nurses utilized their professional knowledge and experience when identifying and navigating these ethical dilemmas; they resolved ethical uncertainties through peer discussion and collaboration with fellow nurses and other professionals. Discussion: We discussed the findings in light of Annemarie Mol's interpretation of the ethics of care. Mol expands the notion of ethical care to include the action of technologies. Conclusion: Although the increasing use of visual technologies offered benefits, school nurses faced ethical challenges in health dialogues with adolescents. To address and navigate these ethical issues, they relied on their experience and caring practices based on their professional ethics. Uncertainties were resolved through peer dialogue and guidance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Obstetric ultrasound is key to opposing ways of valuing foetuses, that is, both to the ascription of foetal personhood and to foetal selection and termination of pregnancy. Whilst ultrasound images are increasingly common within the public sphere there has been relatively little public discussion of its role in identifying actual or potential foetal anomaly and the consequences of this. This paper examines how professionals working with obstetric ultrasound encounter, navigate and make sense of the different uses of this technology. Professionals commonly delineate their work (as providing information) from women’s autonomous choices. Emphasising “women’s choice” can obscure consideration of different collective ways of valuing foetuses with anomalies. It can also deflect consideration of the fundamentally ambiguous information that ultrasound can produce. Distinguishing information from choice is underpinned by a questionable fact–value distinction. We describe alternate professional practices which involve questioning these binaries and foregrounding clinicians’ responsibilities for women’s current and future experience. Public discussion of ultrasound’s different roles in valuing foetuses would be enriched if the discourses and practices shaping professionals’ attempts to facilitate ethical decision-making were included for collective consideration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine pregnant women's experiences with routinised obstetric ultrasound as entailed in their antenatal care during planned pregnancies. This paper highlights the ambiguity of ultrasound technology in the constitution of maternal-foetal connections. Our analysis focusses on Australian women's experiences of the ontological, aesthetic and epistemological ambiguities afforded by ultrasound. We argue that these ambiguities offer possibilities for connecting to the foetus in ways that maintain a kind of unknowability; they afford an openness and ethical responsiveness irrespective of the future of the foetus. This suggests that elucidating women's experience has implications for theorising ethics across maternal-foetal relations and, more specifically, for the 'moral pioneering' (Rapp, 2000) that reproductive technologies can demand of women. Moral pioneering cannot be reduced to moments or processes of decision-making; it must allow for greater recognition of the affective commitments entailed in and incited by ultrasound. Furthermore, focussing on experiences of the ambiguity of ultrasound allows for understanding the ways in which affectivity circulates across domains commonly understood as medical or social, public or private. In doing so, it contributes to undermining a series of tensions that currently shape feminist analysis of obstetric ultrasound, often at the expense of the experience of women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do antidepressants work? This often-asked question continues to attract debate. The depressed individual features in many debates about antidepressants' action. With this focus, discussion oscillates over whether antidepressants work to remedy chemical imbalances in the brains of depressed people, or produce inauthentic states of being. This article argues shifting the analytic focus away from the depressed individual and onto the collective body, or assemblage, moves debates about how antidepressants work into more productive terrain. This provides a new way of looking at how antidepressants work to facilitate recovery from depression through a series of collaborative connections or relationships. Drawing on the charts, photos, and narratives from research encounters with people who take antidepressants, the article illustrates how medication facilitates the creation of active associations in an assemblage of forces. The article concludes by discussing the new ways of thinking about depression, medication and recovery suggested by this understanding of antidepressant action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A key concern for qualitative inquiry is finding ways to account for nonhuman and emergent forms of life. Toward this, researchers are experimenting with research practices that decenter the human subject. Deleuze's (1977) assemblage concept has proved a useful resource for these methodological experiments. Most often, the assemblage concept has informed analysis and writing processes. This article puts the assemblage concept to work during each stage of an empirical research project exploring how people experience antidepressant use. It details seven ways that assemblages are used during concrete research processes across the span of the project. This strategy generates a sensibility toward qualitative inquiry described as orientating to assembling. The sensibility decenters the human as the focus of qualitative research. It enables the presence of nonhuman objects, not as acted-upon, but agents in the research processes. The article contributes to the challenges posed to human-centered qualitative research by reframing the focus entirely. It shows how using a sensibility that consistently decenters the human across all stages of empirical research projects, is a way that qualitative inquiry can account for more-than-human worlds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

News coverage of tobacco issues influences both individual behavior change and policy progression. Thus, media advocacy is increasingly recognized as important for promoting public health. Letters to the editor (LTE) are a basic form of media advocacy, serving to demonstrate community sentiment on a given issue. Such letters are yet to receive systematic analytic consideration. The authors conducted an ethnographic content analysis of LTE on tobacco issues from a sample of 11 Australian daily newspapers over a 3-year period (2001 to 2003, N = 361). They argue that letters are artifacts of active engagement in a public debate and note that various stakeholders adopt similar strategies to pursue their objectives. They illustrate how identifying personal and collective identities is crucial in the assertion of legitimacy of voice in LTEs. Better understanding is needed of both the particular issues that spark public engagement, and the salient rhetoric employed by advocates of disparate positions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose. To characterize the presence of advocacy groups in media coverage about tobacco issues. Design. A content analysis of tobacco-related newspaper articles. Setting. Australia. Sample. All 12 national and state capital daily newspapers published in Australia between 2004 and 2007. Measures. We coded each article for explicit mentions of any of 16 major national or state tobacco control advocacy groups; for the article type, prominence, and topic; for the tone of the event; and for the author's opinion. Analysis. A series of 2 × 2 x² analyses assessed the extent to which advocacy groups were more or less likely to be mentioned in articles of each type, prominence, topic, event impact, and opinion orientation. Results. Of the 4387 tobacco-related articles published over this period, 22% mentioned an advocacy group. There was a greater-than-expected proportion of advocacy groups mentioned in news articles with very high prominence (44%; x² [1, N = 3118] = 27.4, p < .001), high prominence (34%; x² [1, N = 3118J = 10.9, p < .001), and medium prominence (30%; x² [1, N= 3118] = 7.3, p = .007), and in articles covering events with mixed (30%; x² [1, N = 4387] = 10.0, p = .002) or positive (24%; x² [1, N = 43871 = 26.1, p <.001)implications for tobacco control. Conclusions. Australian tobacco control advocacy groups have a reasonable presence within the news discourse on tobacco control issues and so are likely to contribute to generating and shaping this discourse, particularly in relation to evolving and controversial issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]