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In technical and professional communication, the social justice turn calls on us to interrogate sites of positionality, privilege, and power to help foreground strategies that can empower marginalized groups. I propose that mainstream media coverage of the opioid epidemic represents such a site because addiction to these drugs, which initially primarily affected White people, has been positioned as a public health issue rather than a criminal justice problem. I explore the strategies that were used to create this positioning by investigating themes in the visual rhetoric as conveyed through data visualizations and in the text of the articles in which these graphics were published. My results align with two previous studies that confirmed this public health framing. I also observed an emphasis on mortality, which contributes to our understanding of rhetorical strategies that can be used to engender support rather than condemnation for those suffering from drug addiction.

Medical cartography became an important data visualization tool in the 19th century. In this article, the author argues that early yellow fever maps invoked power and authority over diseased space through their visual conventions and scientific authority as statistical graphics as well as by visually reinforcing underlying Western ideologies about disease, illness, and health. Further, the creation of these maps established a visual precedent for invoking this authority that continues today. As public health continues to move toward a global health perspective in the 21st century, understanding how mapping constructs and shapes knowledge about disease, illness, and health will become increasingly important.

In this article, the author proposes that the emergence of digital, disease-tracking applications over the past ten years like HealthMap (healthmap.org) and Flu Near You (flunearyou.org) that allow non-experts to contribute information about emergent public health threats have facilitated a "do-it-yourself (DIY)" risk assessment ethic. Focusing in particular on Flu Near You (FNY), a crowdsourced, flu-tracking program, the author argues that some participants use the mapping feature to curate their own risk information experience in determining the preventative behaviors they may want to engage in (if any) to prevent flu. As outbreaks of infectious diseases increase (Smith et al., 2014), mHealth technologies like disease-tracking apps are evolving as an important risk assessment tool for both public health experts as well as non-expert, public audiences. Better understanding how non-experts use such information can inform not only the design of these apps but visual risk communication strategies more generally speaking.