pandemic

Who’s Health Matters? An Autoethnographic Reflection on Belonging, Autonomy, and the Lines We Draw

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Written by Franciska Neuhäuser

Read me
like a country you cannot pronounce
but whose soil grows under your tongue anyway. 

There is a moment when health stops being abstract.
For me, it was the moment I realised that I no longer belonged.

The title of my thesis – Who’s Health Matters? – is intentional.

My Master’s research is an autoethnographic exploration of Aotearoa New Zealand’s Covid-19 vaccine mandates. It weaves together personal narrative, critical reflection, and creative expression to examine how health, autonomy, and belonging were experienced and negotiated during the pandemic. From a critical health psychology perspective, health is not simply biological, but socially constructed – shaped by discourse, power, and systems of meaning (Chamberlain et al., 2018; Lyons & Chamberlain, 2017).

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AI-Human Collaboration: From Quant to Qual, Turning Data into Meaning

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Written by Paulina Bondaronek and Siobhán Healy-Cullen

Image depicting AI-Human collab created using rather primitive prompting in Ideogram.

Machine-assisted topic analysis (MATA) aims to use the efficiency of Artificial Intelligence and combines it with the nuanced and rich insights derived from qualitative analysis. I call this a “meaningful AI-Human collaboration”. MATA was developed in response to a significant challenge during the COVID-19 pandemic; I was tasked with analysing and providing actionable insights based on 16,000 free-text responses to the question “How could we improve the service” (rapidly). The service in question was the NHS Test & Trace, which managed the pandemic response in England. With only my eyeballs to rely on (…and my expertise as a Behavioural Scientist), I recognised the potential of technology to speed up this task.

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Human-Dog Companionship and Wellbeing: Decentring the human in critical health psychology?

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By Elizabeth Peel

Photo by Peter Schulz on Unsplash

‘We are who we are as much because of our relationships with non-human animals as because of the human ones, and we do ourselves a great disservice – and probably great harm – by denying or ignoring this.’

Podberscek et al., 2000, p. 2

In embarking on a new research adventure we often construct accounts (rationale / scientific justification) for the why, what, and how of the project. These accounts are recipient designed, tailored to the audience – whether that be a funding body, key stakeholder, or curious colleague. I’ve said before that it is important to have a ‘passion project’. The simply labelled Dog Talking and Walking project is currently mine, and I hope to convey the value of, and enthusiasm for, taking connections with canines seriously in this blog (see Haraway, 2003).

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Research in the era of COVID19: A Gentle Reminder

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by Maryann Wei, August 2020

The global health emergency caused by the outbreak of the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, known colloquially as COVID19, since late 2019 has resulted in calls for COVID19-related topics to be prioritised in research to inform the public health response to the pandemic. Acting on the urgent need for research (and to some extent, social responsibility), many leading cross-disciplinary journals have offered publication fee waivers for research papers covering a COVID19-related topic in any field, including but not limited to chemistry, biology, medicine, economics, and psychology. Further, in many (if not all) of these cases, the open-access fee additional to the cost of publication is also relinquished.

hands with latex gloves holding a globe with a face mask
Photo by Anna Shvets on Pexels.com
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Keeping faith in troubled times

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By Wendy Stainton Rogers, July 2020

Last month I found myself in a weird situation. It had taken me some time to make the final corrections to a paper I had had accepted (by Feminism & Psychology). I had written it under what we now call ‘normal’ conditions, and here I was, ‘shielding’ myself while working within the  Covid 19 + #BlackLivesMatter (BLM) situation. The world had changed profoundly, and I realised the paper needed to change too.

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Remember the value of our older community members

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By Christine Stephens, May 2020

I was somewhat alarmed to find myself, as a 70-year-old, suddenly categorised as a member of a particularly vulnerable group. This is a group of people based only on the number of years that they have lived who have been singled out as needing to be extra careful and isolated earlier than others during the Covid-19 pandemic. Of course, this is for the protection of our health and signals society’s concern and protection of members of the population who are clearly more at risk.

As we age, we are more likely to suffer the underlying health issues which also make people more vulnerable to this virus. Unfortunately, using such a crude indicator of vulnerability as age alone has its downside. Categorising people in this way feeds into prejudice against older people and a deficit view of ageing that is already circulating in our society. Such ageist attitudes depict people in terms of their age alone and obscure the huge diversity that actually exists among older people.

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Responding to a pandemic: What can we learn from African scholars?

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By Tracy Morison, May 2020

African countries’ responses to the COVID19 pandemic are complicated by an array of economic and health challenges, introduced and entrenched by neo/colonialism and neoliberal economics. Yet, at the same time, the histories and present realities of these settings mean that African scholars have a different perspective on how to respond to the pandemic than those in more privileged settings. In this piece, I reflect on two important lessons that can be learned from African responses.

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The story of COVID-19, by the numbers

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By Mark Davis, May 2020

The COVID-19 pandemic was announced on 11 March 2020 by the World Health Organization, marking a turning point for the public health systems serving the health of constituent populations across the globe. This declaration moment is important for narrative on COVID-19 because it is the point at which it is accepted that the virus is not only travelling to different countries, but is now circulating in those countries. Governments are now required to take action to moderate the impact of the infection, reducing harm for the polity until the virus – through the mutation of its biological properties, human immunity, vaccines or some combination of these – takes its place, we hope, among the many other microbes with which human life has found co-existence.

The WHO declaration is also an important moment for the COVID-19 story because it reveals how data about notifications of diagnosed infection and deaths are used to make decisions and therefore reveals how, in the circumstances of a pandemic, it is keenly apparent that numerical and narrative futures constitute each other.

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