Health awareness as genre: the exigence of preparedness in cancer awareness campaigns and critical-illness insurance marketing

Imperatives of health or happiness: Narrative constructions of long-term smoking after undergoing lung screening

Tobacco control policies reinforce a health imperative that positions citizens as duty-bound to manage their health by abstaining from or quitting smoking. Limited attention is paid to the repercussions - especially for lung screening - of anti-smoking rhetoric emphasising individual responsibility. Drawing on interviews with 27 long-term smokers involved in an international lung screening trial, this study analysed Australian smokers' narratives of smoking. By attending to stigma and the use of public health rhetoric within personal narratives, we show how narratives underscoring individual responsibility for quitting were layered with conflicting explanations of biological responsibility and normative expectations. Ironically, narratives of individual responsibility potentially undermine smoking cessation. In positioning smokers as responsible for their own healthy choices, such rhetoric also positions smokers as responsible for managing their emotional health, which some did through smoking. Thus, anti-smoking campaigns pit the neoliberal imperative of health against the happiness imperative. These findings have implications for the design and delivery of lung screening campaigns. They also support calls to move beyond health messaging emphasising individual choice, towards acknowledging the moral power of structures and public health campaigns to discipline citizens in unintended ways.

Surprise Reveals the Affective-Moral Economies in Cancer Illness Narratives

Emotions, like joy and sorrow, feature in illness narratives, dramatizing stories of becoming: sick, well, controlled, in control. However, brief emotions, such as surprise, have received limited analytic attention in cancer illness narratives. Drawing on 20 interviews with 11 participants with diverse cancer diagnoses, along with the 455 photographs they produced for this study, we address the complex interactions between discourse, societal expectations, and perceptions in moral-affective economies. Tracing the emergence, deployment, and silencing of surprise provided an avenue to explore connections between affect, morality, advocacy, and philanthropy. We show how surprise works to deny uncertainties couched in individual risk, and situate cancer causation within the logics of anticipation, (re)producing socio-cultural etiology narratives. Attending to surprise reveals how some cancers are situated as individual responsibilities, with restricted access to compassion and collective resources. Thus, we interrogate the affective-moral economy underpinning cancer illness narratives, and surprise's pivotal role in its analysis.