BCSM Books

Violence at the Urban Margins

Javier Auyero
Nancy Scheper-Hughes
Philippe Bourgois
2015

Edited by Javier Auyero, Nancy Scheper-Hughes, and Philippe Bourgois In the Americas, debates around issues of citizen's public safety--from debates that erupt after highly publicized events, such as the shootings of Jordan Davis and Trayvon Martin, to those that recurrently dominate the airwaves in Latin America--are dominated by members of the middle and upper-middle classes. However, a cursory count of the victims of urban violence in the Americas reveals that the people suffering the most from violence live, and die, at the lowest of the socio-symbolic order, at...

Metrics: What Counts in Global Health

Vincanne Adams
2016

Edited by Vincanne Adams - This volume's contributors evaluate the accomplishments, limits, and consequences of using quantitative metrics in global health. Whether analyzing maternal mortality rates, the relationships between political goals and metrics data, or the links between health outcomes and a program's fiscal support, the contributors question the ability of metrics to solve global health problems. They capture a moment when global health scholars and practitioners must evaluate the potential effectiveness and pitfalls of different metrics—even as they...

What's Making Our Children Sick?

Michelle Perro
Vincanne Adams
2017

By Michelle Perro and Vincanne Adams - With chronic disorders among American children reaching epidemic levels, hundreds of thousands of parents are desperately seeking solutions to their children’s declining health, often with little medical guidance from the experts. What’s Making Our Children Sick? convincingly explains how agrochemical industrial production and genetic modification of foods is a culprit in this epidemic. Is it the only culprit? No. Most chronic health disorders have multiple causes and require careful disentanglement and complex treatments....

Unlearning: Rethinking Poetics, Pandemics, and the Politics of Knowledge

Charles Briggs
2021

By Charles Briggs - Unlearning questions intellectual foundations and charts new paths forward. Briggs argues, through an expansive look back at his own influential works as well as critical readings of the field, that scholars can disrupt existing social and discourse theories across disciplines when they collaborate with theorists whose insights are not constrained by the bounds of scholarship.

Eschewing narrow Eurocentric modes of explanation and research foci, Briggs brings together colonialism, health, media, and psychoanalysis to rethink...

Slum Health: From the Cell to the Street

Jason Corburn
Lee Riley
2016

Jason Corburn - Urban slum dwellers—especially in emerging-economy countries—are often poor, live in squalor, and suffer unnecessarily from disease, disability, premature death, and reduced life expectancy. Yet living in a city can and should be healthy. Slum Health exposes how and why slums can be unhealthy; reveals that not all slums are equal in terms of the hazards and health issues faced by residents; and suggests how slum dwellers, scientists, and social movements can come together to make slum life safer, more just, and healthier. Editors Jason...

addicted.pregnant.poor

Kelly Ray Knight
2015

Kelly Ray Knight - For the addicted, pregnant, and poor women living in daily-rent hotels in San Francisco's Mission district, life is marked by battles against drug cravings, housing debt, and potential violence. In this stunning ethnography Kelly Ray Knight presents these women in all their complex humanity and asks what kinds of futures are possible for them given their seemingly hopeless situation. During her four years of fieldwork Knight documented women’s struggles as they traveled from the street to the clinic, jail, and family court, and back to the hotels....

Cities for Life: How Communities Can Recover from Trauma and Rebuild for Health

Jason Corburn
2021

By Jason Corburn - In Cities for Life, public health expert Jason Corburn shares lessons from three of these cities: Richmond, California; Medellín, Colombia; and Nairobi, Kenya. Corburn draws from his work with citizens, activists, and decision-makers in these cities over a ten-year period, as individuals and communities worked to heal from trauma—from gun violence, housing and food insecurity, and poverty. Corburn shows how any community can rebuild their social institutions, practices, and policies to be more focused on healing and health...

How to Sell a Poison: The Rise, Fall, and Toxic Return of DDT

Elena Conis
2022

By Elena Conis - The story of an infamous poison that left toxic bodies and decimated wildlife in its wake is also a cautionary tale about how corporations stoke the flames of science denialism for profit. The chemical compound DDT first earned fame during World War II by wiping out insects that caused disease and boosting Allied forces to victory. Americans granted it a hero’s homecoming, spraying it on everything from crops and livestock to cupboards and curtains. Then, in 1972, it was banned in the US. But decades after that, a cry arose to demand its return.

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Enveloped Lives: Caring and Relating in Lithuanian Health Care

Rima Praspaliauskiene
2022

By Rima Praspaliauskiene - Handing envelopes containing money or gifts to doctors in public health care is often seen as a remnant of socialism that continues as an integral part of the Lithuanian health care system. Rima Praspaliauskiene uses the envelope to explore complex doctor-patient interactions that go beyond notions of the gift or the bribe. She reshapes our definition of corruption and encourages seeing these practices as emerging forms of care that impede the neoliberal health care reforms effected in the post-Soviet era.

Enveloped Lives...