Katherine A. Foss Livres

Media plays a crucial role in shaping public perception during epidemics, influencing not only the dissemination of information but also reflecting societal prejudices and political agendas. Analyzing seven significant outbreaks over two centuries, Katherine A. Foss explores how journalism and medicine intersect to frame narratives about disease. Each case study reveals the complexities of historical context, including colonization and war, while connecting past events to contemporary health debates, such as vaccine hesitancy, ultimately highlighting what is remembered and what is overlooked in our understanding of epidemics.

Demonstrates how news reporting on epidemics communicates more than just information about pathogens; rather, prejudices, political agendas, religious beliefs, and theories of disease also shape the message.

Beyond Princess Culture: Gender and Children's Marketing' explores the impact of a post-princess space, examining potential agency and empowerment in the products' users while acknowledging that at least some alternatives continue to perpetuate components of the rigidly gender-coded princess culture. This book collectively critiques the commodification of the post-princess child consumer through analysis of historical and contemporary toys, video games, clothing, websites, and other popular culture phenomena. Guided by theories from feminist and gender studies, 'Beyond Princess Culture' demonstrates how the marketing of children's products has and continues to perpetuate and challenge hegemonic notions of gender, race, ethnicity, ability, and other positions of intersectionality, as situated in the social, economic, and historical contexts

This book centers on the role of media in shaping public perceptions of breastfeeding. Drawing from magazines, doctors’ office materials, parenting books, television, websites, and other media outlets, Katherine A. Foss explores how historical and contemporary media often undermine breastfeeding efforts with formula marketing and narrow portrayals of nursing women and their experiences. Foss argues that the media’s messages play an integral role in setting the standard of public knowledge and attitudes toward breastfeeding, as she traces shifting public perceptions of breastfeeding and their corresponding media constructions from the development of commercial formula through contemporary times. This analysis demonstrates how attributions of blame have negatively impacted public health approaches to breastfeeding, thus confronting the misperception that breastfeeding, and the failure to breastfeed, rests solely on the responsibility of an individual mother.