BCSM Books

Incommunicable: Toward Communicative Justice in Health and Medicine

Charles Briggs
2024

By: Charles L. Briggs

In Incommunicable, Charles L. Briggs examines the long-standing presumptions that medical discourse translates easily across geographic, racial, and class boundaries. Bringing linguistic and medical anthropology into conversation with Black and decolonial theory, he theorizes the failure in health communication as incommunicability, which negatively affects all patients, doctors, and healthcare providers. Briggs draws on W. E. B. Du Bois and the work of three philosopher-physicians—John Locke, Frantz Fanon, and Georges...

Communicative Justice in Health and Medicine

February 26, 2024

A new book by Charles Briggs, Berkeley Center for Social Medicine Co-Chair, will be published by Duke University Press in April. The introduction is available to read online (for free) now. Incommunicable: Toward Communicative Justice in Health and Medicine examines the failures in health communication across geographic, racial, and class boundaries and analyzes their negative effects on patients, doctors, and healthcare providers. Briggs analyzes linguistic and...

https://www.dukeupress.edu/incommunicable

Frische Früchte, kaputte Körper: Migration, Rassismus und die Landwirtschaft in den USA

Seth M. Holmes
2022

By Seth Holmes - Im englischen Original mehrfach ausgezeichnet und nun endlich auf Deutsch erhältlich: Seth M. Holmes bietet eine eingehende Untersuchung des alltäglichen Lebens und Leidens mexikanischer Migrant*innen, die in der modernen US-Landwirtschaft als Erntehelfer*innen arbeiten. Der Anthropologe und Mediziner zeigt, wie Gesundheit und Gesundheitsversorgung durch die Schattenseiten der Konsumgesellschaft, durch Ressentiments gegen Einwander*innen und durch Rassismus leiden.

Holmes' Material ist erschütternd und eindrucksvoll: Er wanderte mit seinen Begleiter...

Corpos Resistentes. Imigração, racismo e trabalho agrícola nos EUA

Seth M. Holmes
2020
Seth Holmes - Nesta investigação sobre o trabalho agrícola realizado por imigrantes mexicanos nos Estados Unidos, o antropólogo Seth Holmes analisa como as forças de mercado, os sentimentos anti-imigração e o racismo destroem os corpos e as vidas.


Ele acompanhou o percurso dos imigrantes indígenas desde as montanhas de Oaxaca até aos campos de trabalho agrícola nos Estados Unidos.

Este é um livro sobre como a desigualdade social se transforma em sofrimento e violência e confronta corpos que teimam em resistir.

Fruta fresca, cuerpos marchitos

Seth M. Holmes
2017

Seth Holmes - Este libro muestra la realidad de los migrantes mexicanos a Estados Unidos, para el trabajo agrícola. Además de un texto académico, es un libro que puede leerse como libro de aventuras. Su autor hace una crónica descarnada de lo que han tenido que pasar los indígenas mexicanos en su proceso migratorio, el cruce del desierto, el peligro, la explotación laboral y la realidad de salud. Un texto que resulta sobrecogedor. El libro ha sido ganador de varios premios como el premio Margaret Mead en 2014, el Premio de la Antropología del Trabajo en el 2013 o el...

Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies: Migrant Farmworkers in the United States

Seth M. Holmes
2013

Seth Holmes - An anthropologist and MD in the mold of Paul Farmer and Didier Fassin, Seth Holmes shows how market forces, anti-immigrant sentiment, and racism undermine health and healthcare. Holmes’s material is visceral and powerful. He trekked with his companions illegally through the desert into Arizona and was jailed with them before they were deported. He lived with indigenous families in the mountains of Oaxaca and in farm labor camps in the U.S., planted and harvested corn, picked strawberries, and accompanied sick workers to clinics and hospitals. This “...

Making Health Public: How News Coverage Is Remaking Media, Medicine, and Contemporary Life

Charles Briggs
Daniel C. Hallin
2016

By Charles L. Briggs and Daniel Hallin - This book examines the relationship between media and medicine, considering the fundamental role of news coverage in constructing wider cultural understandings of health and disease. The authors advance the notion of ‘biomediatization’ and demonstrate how health knowledge is co-produced through connections between dispersed sites and forms of expertise. The chapters offer an innovative combination of media content analysis and ethnographic data on the production and circulation of health news, drawing on work with...

Tell Me Why My Children Died: Rabies, Indigenous Knowledge, and Communicative Justice

Charles Briggs
Clara Mantini-Briggs
2016

Charles L. Briggs and Clara Mantini-Briggs -Tell Me Why My Children Died tells the gripping story of indigenous leaders' efforts to identify a strange disease that killed thirty-two children and six young adults in a Venezuelan rain forest between 2007 and 2008. In this pathbreaking book, Charles L. Briggs and Clara Mantini-Briggs relay the nightmarish and difficult experiences of doctors, patients, parents, local leaders, healers, and epidemiologists; detail how journalists first created a smoke screen, then projected the epidemic worldwide; discuss the Chávez...

Epidemic Illusions: On the Coloniality of Global Public Health

Eugene Richardson
2020

By Eugene T. Richardson - In Epidemic Illusions, Eugene Richardson, a physician and an anthropologist, contends that public health practices—from epidemiological modeling and outbreak containment to Big Data and causal inference—play an essential role in perpetuating a range of global inequities. Drawing on postcolonial theory, medical anthropology, and critical science studies, Richardson demonstrates the ways in which the flagship discipline of epidemiology has been shaped by the colonial, racist, and patriarchal system that had its inception in 1492.

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What's the Use of Race? Modern Governance and the Biology of Difference

Ian Whitmarsh
David S. Jones
2010

Edited by Ian Whitmarsh and David Jones - The post–civil rights era perspective of many scientists and scholars was that race was nothing more than a social construction. Recently, however, the relevance of race as a social, legal, and medical category has been reinvigorated by science, especially by discoveries in genetics. Although in 2000 the Human Genome Project reported that humans shared 99.9 percent of their genetic code, scientists soon began to argue that the degree of variation was actually greater than this, and that this variation maps...