Colleen Derkatch

@colleenderkatch.bsky.social

959 Followers 343 Following

Professor/grump. Rhetoric of health & medicine. Books: Why Wellness Sells (Johns Hopkins); Bounding Biomedicine (Chicago). Co-Editor, Johns Hopkins Health Humanities (book series)

15 adults and two around the edge of a bowl at a skatepark. Some are wearing helmets and other safety gear or holding skateboards.
A group of over-40 skateboarders sitting on the edge of a concrete pool at a skatepark. Later Skaters meetup in Newmarket, Ontario.
Image of a man with two small children climbing on his back piggy-back style. They're seated in a living room with a sectional couch and a coffee table with a plant and books on it.
Tweets from account @rubycumulous from 4 Jan 2021. "neurodivergent people tend to move in packs like poorly emotionally regulated wolves so if all of your friends have adhd i have some news for you." "if you can name 10 autistic friends off the top of your head then i have some news for you"
AI Overview of results of a search for "Supplements as symbols." The AI-generated overview synthesizes the arguments from a research article as general facts about the topic, such as "The concept of 'supplements as symbols' is often used in arguments agains the regulation of natural health products."
4 people smiling while on a ski tour track in a snowy forest.
After Canadian lawmakers proposed legislation in 2008 to better enforce existing regulations of the supplement industry, Canadians mounted significant public protest, including an online petition that garnered more than 24,000 signatures and 8585 comments over several months. In this article, we offer a rhetorical analysis of a randomized sample of those comments to track the range of topics and arguments advanced by signatories against the legislation. We identify five primary topics that recur throughout the dataset, freedom, choice, health, greed, and nature, which in turn furnish sixteen core arguments that together illuminate the signatories' primary concerns about potentially losing access to supplements. Ultimately, the topics and arguments reveal deep and persistent public anxieties not only about individuals’ health but also about their agency and autonomy. This study both provides insight into why people reject government oversight of health in favor of alternative, natural health interventions and illustrates the utility of qualitative analysis of public commentary about health and health policy in texts such as petitions, public comment periods, and social media responses, all of which are rich sites of discourse that merit further study from both scholars, policy-makers, and health researchers and practitioners.
Video footage of people on bicycles, taking over a lane of traffic to protest the removal of bike lanes in Toronto.
Sign: Dear Santa, all I want is bike lanes
Screenshot from May 2014 highlighting the word “abortiun” with a dialogue above it that says “no replacements found”
Ancient Chinese statue with the hands broken off.