Smoke and Mirrors: Inverting the Discourse on Tobacco

Abstract

Understanding the mechanisms that construct and maintain the taken-for-granted, "common sense" understandings of everyday life is an essential prerequisite for reconfiguring conditions in more progressive directions. Highlighting particular moments, when these processes can be made visible, and drawing appropriate insights from such interrogations is useful not only for illuminating the fundamental malleability of "common sense" (itself a crucial element of change), but also for providing suggestive strategies and tactics for effectuating change. Here the construction and reconstruction of the "common sense" around tobacco is offered as an instructive case.

Making molehills out of mountains: Keeping the tempest in the teapot

“…The section should canvas efforts produced through undergraduate and graduate pedagogy, through scholarly research and writing, and through the work of activists and practitioners on the ground. Highlighting this kind of translational work, including documentation and elucidation of moments when “common sense” was altered for progressive purposes (on this, see, for example, Waterstone, 2010), could produce new and unanticipated synergies and collaborations. Importantly, dedicated attention could also help to raise the status of such activity relative to the production of “new” knowledge.…”

Where There's Smoke There's Fire: Outdoor Smoking Bans and Claims to Public Space

“…Smokefree legislation exemplifies Valverde's point, as the dramatic changes to the smoking landscape over the past two decades have stemmed primarily from ordinances enacted at the municipal level. For example, using California as a case study, Waterstone (2010) illustrates the instrumental role of nonsmokers' rights groups in developing ordinances, and then utilizing local activists to work the political machinery in their communities to ensure their implementation. It was the enactment of hundreds of these local ordinances that eventually led to the implementation of statewide smokefree legislation (California Department of Health Services, 1998, p. 4)-a pattern that also occurred in Canada (Asbridge, 2004;Nykiforuk, Campbell, Cameron, Brown, & Eyles, 2007).…”