Outbreak Anxieties: The Contingent Politics of Panic and Crisis in America

FAIN: RZ-51757-14

Columbia University (New York, NY 10027-7922)
Amy Lauren Fairchild (Project Director: January 2014 to May 2021)
Constance A. Nathanson (Co Project Director: January 2014 to May 2021)

The writing of a book and several articles analyzing the history of American responses to perceived panics and crises relating to public health. (36 months)

Panic and crises—different sides of the same coin, labels applied to perceived threats to order—are leitmotifs that run throughout the history of medicine and public health. Remarkably, there is no history that interrogates disease-related panics either from the perspective of social history or the history of ideas. Likewise, there has been no sustained attention to crisis as a routine and historically recurrent, even necessary, catalyst for public health institution building. We consider crisis and disease-related panic in the context of four critical paradigm shifts that historians of international history and public health have used as analytic frames. Our approach draws on the conceptual strengths of sociology to frame the roles and meanings of panic and crisis and pair it with the power of history to locate events in context in a thickly descriptive fashion, uniquely positioning us to examine the politics of crisis and panic not in static, predictive terms but rather as historical

Associated Products

The Two Faces of Fear: A History of Hard-Hitting Public Health Campaigns Against Tobacco and AIDS (Article)
Title: The Two Faces of Fear: A History of Hard-Hitting Public Health Campaigns Against Tobacco and AIDS
Author: Amy L. Fairchild
Author: Ronald Bayer
Author: Sharon Green
Author: Constance Nathanson
Author: James Colgrove
Author: Elizabeth Kilgore
Author: Monica Sweeny
Author: Jay Varma
Abstract: Fear is now commonly used in public health campaigns, yet for years ethical and efficacy-centered concerns provided a challenge to using fear in such efforts. From the 1950s through the 1970s, the field of public health believed that using fear to influence individual behavior would virtually always backfire. Yet faced with the limited effectiveness of informational approaches to cessation, antitobacco campaigns featured fear in the 1960s. These provoked little protest outside the tobacco industry. At the outset of the AIDS epidemic, fear was also employed. However, activists denounced these messages as stigmatizing, halting use of fear for HIV/AIDS until the 21st century. Opposition began to fracture with growing concerns about complacency and the risks of HIV transmission, particularly among gay men. With AIDS, fear overcame opposition only when it was framed as fair warning with the potential to correct misperceptions.
Year: 2018
Primary URL: https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2018.304516
Access Model: open access
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: American Journal of Public Health 108, 1180_1186

Public Health with a Punch: Fear, Stigma, and Hard-Hitting Media Campaigns (Book Section)
Title: Public Health with a Punch: Fear, Stigma, and Hard-Hitting Media Campaigns
Author: Amy L. Fairchild
Author: Ronald Bayer
Editor: Brenda Major
Editor: John F. Dovidio
Editor: Bruce G. Link
Abstract: The conventional perspective that fear is a bad motivator for behavioral change, so critical to public health, is both an empirical observation and a moral judgment. This chapter challenges the belief that fear cannot work and is, indeed, counterproductive. The chapter then turns to the ethical debate, which for years was shaped by bioethics. The chapter concludes by arguing that the perspective of bioethics, so centrally concerned with the individual, provides an inadequate moral frame for thinking about fear-based campaigns. Instead, the chapter proposes the notion of public health ethics, which has as its grounding principle the enhancement of population well-being. Fear-based campaigns may be morally legitimate once the population benefits are clearly articulated and the potential social costs carefully evaluated in a process that is open, transparent, and engages the populations toward whom fear-based campaigns will be directed.
Year: 2017
Primary URL: https://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190243470.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780190243470-e-25
Access Model: open access
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Book Title: The Oxford Handbook of Stigma, Discrimination, and Health
ISBN: 9780190243470

Don’t Panic! The ‘Excited and Terrified’ Public Mind from Yellow Fever to Bioterrorism (Book Section)
Title: Don’t Panic! The ‘Excited and Terrified’ Public Mind from Yellow Fever to Bioterrorism
Author: Amy L. Fairchild
Author: David Merritt Johns
Editor: Robert Peckham
Abstract: Fairchild and Johns undertake a theoretical and empirical consideration of mass infectious disease panics in the United States. They argue that contemporary concerns about panic rehearse earlier experiences of panic. Adapting the notion of the “social drama” developed by the cultural anthropologist Victor Turner, they propose the “panic drama” as a means of elucidating the “script” that underlies late nineteenth and twentieth-century panic responses. Through the lenses of yellow fever, influenza, smallpox, swine flu, and biowarfare (later called bioterrorism), they show how panic has been bound “into the very construction of epidemics.” Their purpose is to trace how the “panic drama” has been modified over more than a century, with dramatic components reconfigured—as well as examining the shifting role that institutions and authority have played in this process—while the basic panic narrative has been maintained.
Year: 2015
Primary URL: https://hongkong.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.5790/hongkong/9789888208449.001.0001/upso-9789888208449-chapter-007
Access Model: open access
Publisher: University of Hong Kong Press
Book Title: Empires of Panic: Epidemics and Colonial Anxieties
ISBN: 9789888208449

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