Assignment - research paper
Hmmmm....
I am wondering whether I am studying doctor or Journalism?
LOL! Look at my research below.
Name: Clarissa, Huay Ching Ngoh
ID: 110108911
Introduction to communication and cultural
studies Assessment 2— Research
paper (2,000 words, 7 references and 5 quotes)
Theme: Social campaigns, communications systems
and social practice.
Topic: Communication systems are complex, socially located tools for
circulating cultural values and social structures. Describe your communication
system. Provide in-depth analysis of the discourse (or discourses) and
ideologies that occur in your choice of social campaign and comment on the
values and social structures they represent.
Key terms: Ideology and
discourse, communication system, diabetes, diabetic, ethnicity, social.
Introduction
Among
critical theorists, Foucault (1993) claimed the term of ‘discourse’ means high
social knowledge rather than neither language nor social interaction. We have
wrong concepts that discourse have been primarily language or sociology, we
have to think about discourse has an entirely different concept in different
fields which have the same noun as something we have been know. In the case of medical
field, I am going to explore how diabetes involved with in the public discourse.
Diet plays a basic role in the good health maintenance throughout human life.
Based on scientific research, diet has been interrelated to the diabetic
disease (Schulze and Hu 2002; Williams et al. 1999). Thus, world health
organization (2013) advised consumers to eat more healthily for health.
Body
In the discourse
analysis, the objective is designed to get a broader historical understanding
of diabetes, the marketing incorporated employed and how diabetes influenced in
the public discourse. In
my choice of social campaign ‘Diabetes’, the NGO goes to ‘Diabetes WA’ which
founded in 1965, the depth analysis of possible complications about diabetes
are kidney failure, eye damage, cardiovascular disease, nerve damage and foot
complication. Diabetes is a serious illness and has no cures. Diabetes is top
chronic disease in Australia with roughly 275 nations developing the illness
every day. In Western Australia, there are more than 107,000 people suffered
from diabetes. If left untreated, it can lead to heart attack, stroke, kidney
failure and many other more. However, the good news is that type 2 Diabetes can
be cure by positive lifestyle changes as the risk of developing type 2 Diabetes
can be cure by maintaining a healthy weight, being physically healthy as well
as having a healthy diet. Diabetes WA has a team of health campaign experts who
work with the community and a few organisations promote the prevention of type
2 Diabetes and also other chronic illnesses. This work includes a few
campaigns, programs and also services that help minimize the risk factors and
facilitate early awareness for type 2 Diabetes.
(Diabetes text 1)
Diabetes is one of the diseases
which leading cause of death in Australia, its approximated 4% in prevalence,
Cologiuri, Colagiuri and Ward (1998) suggested it has higher rates among
subsets comprise elder, indigenous Australians, Chinese and some Pacific
Islanders. Although wide health promotion campaigns, the diabetes popularity
continues to increase so fast that it is basically marked an “epidemic”.
Therefore, the physical and social difficulty of diabetes affects tremendously
in the adult population; because it is a chronic disease, the difficulty has to
face in every day. Nowadays, diabetes management is everywhere, it emphasize on
public accountability for diabetes control, especially control of blood glucose
and of diet consumption. Hereby, we explore how diabetic patients describe
their daily lives experience of controlling their diabetic. We focus on the
discourse people use to shape and think for the interference diabetes causes in
life. Identity and social factors are discussed through what is always a
contradictory discourse of control, discipline and accountability. We analyze
people’s thinking of their diabetes in a few ways, in the first step, we
concentrate on the discourses used; the themes, metaphors as well as images
people use to illustrate diabetes and its management. A few studies found the
importance of discourse in the management of the interference of chronic
disease and indoctrinate the positive meanings into people’s identities. The
diversify meanings of management create a central part of the discourse
surrounding diabetes and people’s efforts to get some self-help in diabetic
management.
Stress is an external force over which people
have barely or no control; which impact on diabetes or generate the right
circumstances for it to continue. Stress has concealed a different range life
experiences. For an instance, a person who has had many health problems and
many operations repeated that his diabetes had been caused by the unhappy
experience of the operations. Vincent’s narrative offers a common example of
how people describe their diabetes which are often weaving into broader
narratives about their social relationships and burden life events. Vincent
explained how his father dead and divorce impacted on him as implicated in the
causes of his illness. He mentioned
“I think the thing that
made me diabetic, my father died two years before I became diabetic and he was
down here on holidays, got sick, I took him to the hospital and he died three
days later…A couple of months after that I got married, 12 months after I got
married, my marriage broke up and that, my wife put me through a lot of
emotional blackmail and things like that, you know so I think all that within
two years, that was terrible and I think that's what really got the diabetes
going.”
His explanation makes really good links
between events two years ago attack of his diabetes, replanning his illness in
terms of his social relationships in a narrative that collapse time. This
explained many meanings an illness brings a person’s life and identity, Stein (1985)
mentioned that
“Illness is inseparable
from and responsive to those internal and external meanings and relationships.”
In another evident, Ivan told a narrative of
a sequence of his life events. He claimed
“The day after my
daughter got married, my wife died … I do blame that as the fact that I ended
up with diabetes… There was no sign of anything like that, I had blood pressure
and normal things at my age, no heart complaints, just the blood pressure…. I do
blame [her] death… it created the problem with the diabetes… It just built up
and built up and bingo.”
(Diabetes text 2)
However, the doctor’s narrative had much less
perceived as a discourse on the pathophysiology verifiable manifestations
including the ideology of narrative as discourse interaction, this research
make an argument that doctor narratives are similarly complex if quite distinct
than patient stories. Certainly, through the analysis of doctor talking about
central discourse on diabetes patients collected in a few different venues for
case presentations, interviews and clinical consultations. Eventually, this
paper calls public attention to some of the methods in which doctor tells about
diabetes are caused by the cultural and class differences between patient and
carer. It should be restates that narrative analysis does not need to come to
an end within itself. Gee et al. (1992) stress out there are two rather
different uses of narrative or discourse analysis. The first thing studies
about
“Focus on the form,
meaning and regularity of supersentence texts as representative instances of
particular discourse genres.” Gee et. Al (1992, pp.229)
Another method, as Gee mentions, is to
utilize discourse analysis as evidence in the survey of some further social or
cognitive process. Our aim in the second method is to grasp the public view and
practise of doctors treating diabetes as bring to light in their narratives and
interplay as well as to understand why this is always such a process of
unsatisfied. Most importantly, while “educating the patient” is the thing most
generally used by doctors to describe what they do in the process of a diabetes
check, education does not randomly relate presenting knowledge to poorly
educated diabetics, many doctors mean that reminding patients for the proper
nutrition is very important yet returning to the things patients know is the
best. A second doctor's spoke about “fear” could serve as
a commentary on the first:
“Well fear's always there. I hate to say always a good
tool to me, sometimes, but umm I think that that's one
thing especially cause most diabetics will
know someone who had to get an amputation, you know. They definitely associate
that with diabetes.”
(Diabetes Text 3)
In the post-colonial area, indigenous people
shows how scientific and prevalence texts support the biological ethnicity
belief. Despite the scientific agreement is that ethnicity is not an
experimental category, many researchers use it without values as a “crude
proxy” for expect genetic differences. The outcome is that diabetes is
classified into social classification assumed to be ethnicity is now always not
merely based on skin colour or other obvious characteristics but also
unpredictable genes tendentious to disease. For an instance, American Diabetes
Association (2005) claimed that most reports of diabetes risk factors came from
North America a discourse like this: Diabetes is more common in African
Americans, Latinos, Native Americans, Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. If
you are a member of one of these ethnic groups, you need to pay special
attention to this test”. This paper show how ethnicity is generated in
discourses around obesity and also diabetes, especially those that focus what
are so called indigenous people – American Indians, indigenous Americans, First
indigenous peoples or native peoples. Type 2 diabetes is a multivariate disease
assumed to be caused by the presence of genetic and environmental factors like
obesity, which is a risk factor all races. The causes of multivariate illness
such as diabetes and heart disease still remain unknown.
What is most noticeable about “the thrifty
genotype” is how a preferably uncertain scientific hypothesis was converted
into a clear racialization that is now a prevalent and a free explanation for
the high risk of diabetes among indigenous peoples. For an instance, Hall
(1999) mentioned an ideology in the Canadian
Medical Association Journal that
“How is it that the
descendants of those whose cultures were displaced by the Europeans are beset
by such a high prevalence of diabetes? Why was a problem at least partly
genetic not eliminated by natural selection? The answers may be found in the
concept of the “thrifty genotype” first proposed and later modified by
geneticist James V. Neel, or in its later variants, including the “New World
syndrome,” “low carbohydrate/cold environment adaptation,” the “Northern
hunting adaptation,” and the “thrifty phenotype” (p. 1315).
(Communication system)
In the research, ‘newspaper column’ is used as communication
system to help in collect deeper information for each brand and expand the case
studies. Newspaper cutting were indexed via a database of Danish media sources.
The keywords were illustrated with extra information because the brand names
having more than one meaning and appearing in irrelevant search to the specific
condition. The first search produced a sum of 744 articles among all sources
indexed in the database. After a deeper review of the outcomes, it was revealed
that articles were always copied across newspapers and most of the case happen
between national and local ones in which the source of the stories came from
national newspapers. Thereby it was decided to reserve articles for the sake of
further analysis. The every each of the cutting was classified based on its
framing, the content whether a positive or negative of a story about the brand
case; the type of health-related claim which pop out in the text, decomposed
into structure claim, health and nutrition claim; details about the marketing
incorporate elements like allocation, positioning and quoted price; problems on
corporative social accountability.
(Conclusion)
Foucault (1984) claimed that discourses
of power can take diversify forms ranging from the relation of discourses and
cultural ideals that enhance gender socialization to more particular discourses
than determine one’s identity in a particular institutional background, such
being a certain kind of patient like diabetic or asthma. In this case, it shows
how discourse or power may debate through diabetes in public. Actions that have
been commenced have followed two main ways, the first one and also the more
traditional ones, is to make clients change their diets by providing details about
healthy eating. Van Assema et al. (2001) argued that such way include common
education of patients on healthy diets, Grunert and Wills (2007) dispute about improving
the understanding and nutrition labels usage and enhancing certain food product
categories like fruits and vegetables.
It is important to
comment on a version which seems to be central discourse. In this term, we
rather concentrate in trying ideology to the main social relations instead of
the critique version which contain negative and critical sense of ideology. Conclusively,
in this sense, Natural
health practitioners quote
‘The ideological establishment of
diabetes permeate some part of the natural health community.’
(2020 words)
References
list:
Bech-Larsen,
T., and J. Scholderer. 2007. Functional foods in Europe: Consumer research,
market experiences and regulatory aspects. Trends in Food Science and
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