Fecal microbiota transplants: emerging social representations in the English-language print media

McLeod, C, Nerlich, B and Jaspal, R ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8463-9519, 2019. Fecal microbiota transplants: emerging social representations in the English-language print media. New Genetics and Society, 38 (3), pp. 331-351. ISSN 1463-6778

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Abstract

This study investigates how English-language news sources have represented fecal microbiota transplants (FMT). FMT involves transferring stool from a healthy donor to a recipient with a dysfunctional intestinal flora in order to repopulate their gut microbiome. FMT applications are increasingly moving into mainstream clinical care. We investigate press coverage of stool transplants, as well as broader themes associated with health and the gut microbiome, in order to uncover emerging social representations. Our findings show that print media focused in particular on creating novel, mainly hopeful, social representations of feces through wordplay and punning, side-lining issues of risk and fear. We also identify changing metaphorical framings of microbes and bacteria from "enemies" to "friends", and ways in which readers are familiarized with FMT through the depiction of the process as both mundane and highly medicalized.

Item Type:	Journal article
Publication Title:	New Genetics and Society
Creators:	McLeod, C., Nerlich, B. and Jaspal, R.
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Date:	July 2019
Volume:	38
Number:	3
ISSN:	1463-6778
Identifiers:	Number Type 10.1080/14636778.2019.1637721 DOI 1313665 Other
Rights:	© 2019 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons. org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Divisions:	Schools > School of Social Sciences
Record created by:	Linda Sullivan
Date Added:	06 Apr 2020 10:28
Last Modified:	06 Apr 2020 10:28
URI:	https://irep.ntu.ac.uk/id/eprint/39566

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