BCSM Books

The Pastoral Clinic: Addiction and Dispossession along the Rio Grande

Angela Garcia
2010

Angela Garcia - The Pastoral Clinic takes us on a penetrating journey into an iconic Western landscape—northern New Mexico’s Española Valley, home to the highest rate of heroin addiction and fatal overdoses in the United States. In a luminous narrative, Angela Garcia chronicles the lives of several Hispanic addicts, introducing us to the intimate, physical, and institutional dependencies in which they are entangled. We discover how history pervades this region that has endured centuries of social inequality, drug and alcohol abuse, and material and cultural...

Malignant: How Cancer Becomes Us

S. Lochlann Jain
2013

S. Lochlann Jain - Nearly half of all Americans will be diagnosed with an invasive cancer—an all-too ordinary aspect of daily life. Through a powerful combination of cultural analysis and memoir, this stunningly original book explores why cancer remains so confounding, despite the billions of dollars spent in the search for a cure. Amidst furious debates over its causes and treatments, scientists generate reams of data—information that ultimately obscures as much as it clarifies. Award-winning anthropologist S. Lochlann Jain deftly unscrambles the high stakes of the...

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...