BCSM Books

Engineering Vulnerability In Pursuit of Climate Adaptation

2022

In Engineering Vulnerability Sarah E. Vaughn examines climate adaptation against the backdrop of ongoing processes of settler colonialism and the global climate change initiatives that seek to intervene in the lives of the world’s most vulnerable. Her case study is Guyana in the aftermath of the 2005 catastrophic flooding that ravaged the country’s Atlantic coastal plain. The country’s ensuing engineering projects reveal the contingencies of climate adaptation and the capacity of flooding to shape Guyanese expectations about racial (in)equality....

The Way That Leads Among the Lost: Life, Death, and Hope in Mexico City's Anexos

Angela Garcia
2024

By Angela Garcia:

Based on over a decade of research, a powerful, moving work of narrative nonfiction that illuminates the little-known world of the anexos of Mexico City, the informal addiction treatment centers where mothers send their children to escape the violence of the drug war.

The Way That Leads Among the Lost reveals a hidden place where care and violence are impossible to separate: the anexos of Mexico City. The prizewinning anthropologist Angela Garcia takes us deep into the world of these small rooms, informal treatment...

Madness in the Family: Women, Care, and Illness in Japan

H. Yumi Kim
2022

By H. Yumi Ki

A significant new interpretation of the history of mental illness in Japan A study of madness/mental illness that centers the experiences of women and families, rather than those of psychiatrists and psychiatric institutions Analyzes how madness and its management have been differentiated by gender

Mourning my inner [blackgirl]child

Reelaviolette Botts-Ward
2021

MOURNING MY INNER[BLACKGIRL]CHILD is an unabashed exposure of girlhood fragility, ancestral grieving, and embodied remembering. In her excavation of multiple pasts and multiple selves, reelaviolette botts-ward journeys through intimate encounters with her mother(s), her home, her body, and her precarity. As she mourns her deepest wounds, reelaviolette lays bare the im/possibilities of Black girlhood, slippages of Black motherhood, and matrilineal legacies of abuse. In telling her story, she tells so many of our own. reelaviolette's poetry invites Black women deeper into our...

Advancing Peace: Ending Urban Gun Violence Through the Power of Redemptive Love

Jason Corburn
2025

By Jason Corburn and DeVone Boggan

Mission possible: ending gun violence in America’s Black and brown communities.

As COVID-19 took hold, urban gun violence exploded—but not in four cities in California. What did these cities have in common? The Advance Peace gun violence prevention program. In Advancing Peace, urban public health scholar Jason Corburn and the program’s founder, DeVone Boggan, reveal how the community-based approach truly works and how it holds out genuine hope, and proven solutions, for those...

Expecting Inequity: How the Maternal Health Crisis Affects Even the Wealthiest Black Americans

Khiara M. Bridges
2026

Racism in maternal healthcare is not reserved for the poor. An unsparing picture of inequities in prenatal care and childbirth in the United States, Expecting Inequity reveals that not only are black people three to four times more likely to die from a pregnancy-related cause, but racial disparities in maternal mortality persist across income levels. That is, wealthier black people are much more likely to die during pregnancy, childbirth, or the postpartum period than their white counterparts. Focusing on a San Francisco obstetrics clinic that caters to the...

All This Safety Is Killing Us: Health Justice Beyond Prisons, Police, and Borders

Carlos Martinez
2025

Edited by Ronica Mukerjee and Carlos Martinez:

Exposing how marginalized communities are vilified by “carceral safety” systems, educators and health justice advocates Carlos Martinez and Ronica Mukerjee call for a radical break with reformist strategies in favor of ones grounded in grassroots organizing and abolition

Prisons, border security, and police forces are meant to protect. Yet for the most vulnerable, they more often cause harm. Funded in response to a never ending “crime wave,” people with disabilities, Black and brown people, trans and queer people...

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

Charles Briggs
Daniel C. Hallin
2024

By Charles L. Briggs and Daniel C. Hallin: This book examines the relationship between media and medicine. Drawing on insights from anthropology, linguistics, and media studies, it considers 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 of knowledge making and through multiple forms of expertise.

The chapters offer an innovative combination of media content...

Authoritarian Absorption: The Transnational Remaking of Epidemic Politics in China

Yan Long
2024

By Yan Long: Authoritarian Absorption portrays the rebuilding of China's pandemic response system through its anti-HIV/AIDS battle from 1978 to 2018. Going beyond the conventional domestic focus, Yan Long analyzes the influence of foreign interventions which challenged the post-socialist state's inexperience with infectious diseases and pushed it towards professionalizing public health bureaucrats and embracing more liberal, globally aligned technocratic measures. This transformation involved a mix of confrontation and collaboration among transnational...

Mother Media: Hot and Cool Parenting in the Twentieth Century

Hannah Zeavin
2025

By Hannah Zeavin: An essential history for understanding how we mother now, and how motherhood itself became a medium—winner of the Brooke Hindle Award from the Society for the History of Technology.

From the nursery to the prison, from the clinic to the commune, Mother Media tells the story of how we arrived at our contemporary understanding of what a mother is and how understandings of “bad” mothering formed our contemporary panics about “bad” media. In this book, leading historian of psychology Hannah Zeavin examines twentieth-...