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The term `telemedicine' refers to health care and health education transmitted over large distances via computer with interactive audio and video capabilities. Over the past decade, telemedicine has been widely hailed as a means of administering health care to rural areas where doctors are scarce. Most research on the subject emphasizes technological, regulatory, and utilitarian aspects of telemedicine. This study, however, develops a cultural studies perspective in order to examine how social relationships are negotiated with regard to telemedicine in a particular context. The contextual focus is South Dakota - a state where telemedicine has rapidly developed in response to an ongoing crisis in health care access. An overview of economic and health care conditions in South Dakota is followed by examinations of network structures through which telemedicine operates in the state and an analysis of how telemedicine is rhetorically constructed in the state's leading newspaper. Concluding sections discuss the hegemonic nature of telemedicine in South Dakota and raise questions about telemedicine in other contexts.

Focusing on cultural practices, and gender issues during a period of the early 20th-century that witnessed radical transformations in sex roles, this anthology of original (and one classic) essays will generate a greater understanding of women's contributions to modernist culture, and explore how that culture was affected by gender issues. The essays provide a wealth of insights into literature, painting, architecture, design, anthropology, sociology, religion, science, popular culture, music, issues of race and ethnicity, and the influence of 20th-century women and sexual politics

"This book is about communicating for health and social change. With a clear focus on public health and health promotion practice, it provides a unique introduction to media and cultural studies perspectives on health communication. Health Communication explores the dynamic world of contemporary mass media and diverse forms of alternative, mobile and social media: How are communities using media to communicate about health and advocate for social change? What are the challenges and opportunities involved with using the media for health communication? How can health promotion practitioners utilise media to create opportunities for more participatory and empowering approaches to health communication? This indispensable guide to health communication provides readers with detailed and practical insights to the role of media and culture in contemporary health issues. Accessible theory is blended with case studies from around the world giving students, academics, and practitioners an invaluable framework for practice and a rich source of material for discussion"--

This article urges sociologists interested in popular culture to adopt a phenomenological perspective focused upon the problem of the meaning of popular culture as world of symbolic forms. It is argued that this problem requires a conceptual apparatus that focuses directly upon culture, now seen as not wholly derivative of social structure, and a view of society as a socially constructed meaningful world rather than an external container that determines action. The proposed approach, which looks at popular culture as a documentary record of the meaningful realities built by social groups, is illustrated by application to recent American developments.

In this paper, I use articulation theory to examine the political discourse which surrounds the Bush Administrations proposed ballistic missile defense shield. I argue that there are three central articulations used by the Bush Administration to garner public support for the ballistic missile defense shield. They are: 1) the articulation of missile defense with national security; 2) the unity formed out of terrorism and the threat of a missile attack by rogue states; and 3) the articulation of missile defense with technological inevitability and progress. I illustrate how these dominant articulations discursively serve to garner support for the proposed shield by setting the parameters around which discussions of missile defense can take place. My primary argument is that the discursive unities made by the Bush Administration out of such elements as terrorism, technology, progress, and capitalism functions to perpetuate and justify a larger American project of exceptionalism, unilateralism, and military hegemony.

In Overcoming Religious Illiteracy, Harvard professor and Phillips Academy, Andover, teacher Diane L. Moore argues that though the United States is one of the most religiously diverse nations in the world, the vast majority of citizens are woefully ignorant about religion itself and the basic tenets of the world's major religious traditions. The consequences of this religious illiteracy are profound and include fueling the culture wars, curtailing historical understanding and promoting religious and racial bigotry. In this volume, Moore combines theory with practice to articulate how to incorporate the study of religion into the schools in ways that will invigorate classrooms and enhance democratic discourse in the public sphere

This thesis practically applied the cultural studies approach and explored two of the components thought relevant to resistance--the text and the audience. The objective was to examine audience sophistication in its engagement with a broadcast music video in order to investigate the nature and scope of audience resistance. A semiotic textual analysis was used to demonstrate that Madonna's Express Yourself video, though structured in dominance, is available for oppositional meanings about women. The semiotic analysis provided a description of the range and kinds of meanings about women the video could circulate. Findings showed that the reader's positioning in terms of feminism made a difference in what was perceived, interpreted and evaluated. The Express Yourself text was read on a number of interpretive levels (sex, love, economics/societal and gender politics) with varying degrees of consciousness (no understanding, literal understanding, individual level, group level and a gender political level of understanding). Traditional participants largely understood the video in a dominant way with patriarchal definitions of femininity and had a individual level of consciousness. Feminist participants were likely to interpret the video using an oppositional counter-patriarchal frame at the gender political level of consciousness. Feminists were much more likely to engage in resistant reading practices. The ethnographic interview method employed here not only provided access to participants' conscious opinions but to the linguistic terms used to construct and communicate understanding. The level of consciousness and thus the level of semiotic resistance was communicated in the graduated ability to articulate the oppositional frame. (Abstract shortened by UMI.) Source: Masters Abstracts International, Volume: 32-02, page: 0381. Adviser: Kai Hildebrandt. Thesis (M.A.)--University of Windsor (Canada), 1992.

This editorial of the Special Issue 'Textures of Diaspora and (Post-)Digitality: A Cultural Studies Approach' explores the digital agency of diasporic communities by showing how cultural and literary studies genuinely contribute to scholarly debates and our understanding of digital diasporas. It explores the implications of the digital in a (post-)digital age, one in which the notion of diaspora is used to refer to actual ethnic, religious communities and to collectives that do not necessarily share any common origin or history but articulate their communality through a 'diaspora rhetoric'. It uses an approach that concentrates on the medial, cultural and aesthetic dimensions of diasporic (self-)representations, positionings and practices in cyberspace. It brings into focus the 'textures' of these communities and points to the need to decode diasporic imageries and the many meanings of those portrayals. It studies the textual and visual language with which diasporic communities are imagined in the digital space.