Asthma, culture, and cultural analysis: continuing challenges.

Recent research indicates that asthma is more complicated than already recognized, requiring a multilateral approach of study in order to better understand its many facets. Apart from being a health problem, asthma is seen as a knowledge problem, and as we argue here, a cultural problem. Employing cultural analysis we outline ways to challenge conventional ideas and practices about asthma by considering how culture shapes asthma experience, diagnosis, management, research, and politics.

Transdisciplinary research strategies for understanding socially patterned disease: the Asthma Coalition on Community, Environment, and Social Stress (ACCESS) project as a case study.

As we have seen a global increase in asthma in the past three decades it has also become clear that it is a socially patterned disease, based on demographic and socioeconomic indicators clustered by areas of residence. This trend is not readily explained by traditional genetic paradigms or physical environmental exposures when considered alone. This has led to consideration of the interplay among physical and psychosocial environmental hazards and the molecular and genetic determinants of risk (i.

From Bhopal to the informating of environmentalism: risk communication in historical perspective.

This essay describes the development of information technology and culture in the environmental field since the 1980s and how this has led to new understandings of risk communication. The essay also describes how environmental information systems operate as instruments of power, in the way they configure and provide access to knowledge, in the way they manage uncertainty, and in the way they build in and project particular modes of subjectivity. The goal is to provide a brief yet compelling glimpse into the "informating of environmentalism.