BCSM Books

All This Safety Is Killing Us: Health Justice Beyond Prisons, Police, and Borders–Abolitionist frameworks and practices from clinicians, organizers, and incarcerated activists

Carlos Martinez
2025

Foreword by Rachel Herzing. 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...

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-...

Women's Empowerment and Global Health: A Twenty-First-Century Agenda

Shari Dworkin
Monica Gandhi
Paige Passano
2016

Shari Dworkin, Monica Gandhi, Paige Passano - What is women’s empowerment, and how and why does it matter for women’s health? These are questions that the University of California Global Health Institute’s (UCGHI) Center of Expertise (COE) on Women’s Health, Gender, and Empowerment aimed to answer with this book. Since 2009 the COE has brought together a multidisciplinary network of experts from across the...

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

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 “...

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...

Markets of Sorrow, Labors of Faith: New Orleans in the Wake of Katrina

Vincanne Adams
2013

Vincanne Adams - Markets of Sorrow, Labors of Faith is an ethnographic account of long-term recovery in post-Katrina New Orleans. It is also a sobering exploration of the privatization of vital social services under market-driven governance. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, public agencies subcontracted disaster relief to private companies that turned the humanitarian work of recovery into lucrative business. These enterprises profited from the very suffering that they failed to ameliorate, producing a second-order disaster that exacerbated inequalities...

A Fraught Embrace: The Romance and Reality of AIDS Altruism in Africa

Ann Swidler
Susan Cotts Watkins
2017

By Ann Swidler and Susan Cotts Watkins - In the wake of the AIDS pandemic, legions of organizations and compassionate individuals descended on Africa from faraway places to offer their help and save lives. A Fraught Embrace shows how the dreams of these altruists became entangled with complex institutional and human relationships. Ann Swidler and Susan Cotts Watkins vividly describe the often mismatched expectations and fantasies of those who seek to help, of the villagers who desperately seek help, and of the brokers on whom both Western altruists and...