BCSM Books

A Disability of the Soul: An Ethnography of Schizophrenia and Mental Illness in Japan

Karen Nakamura
2013

Karen Nakamura - In A Disability of the Soul, Karen Nakamura explores how the members of this unique community struggle with their lives, their illnesses, and the meaning of community. Told through engaging historical narrative, insightful ethnographic vignettes, and compelling life stories, her account of Bethel House depicts its achievements and setbacks, its promises and limitations. A Disability of the Soul is a sensitive and multidimensional portrait of what it means to live with mental illness in contemporary...

Death Without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil

Nancy Scheper-Hughes
1993

Nancy Scheper-Hughes - When lives are dominated by hunger, what becomes of love? When assaulted by daily acts of violence and untimely death, what happens to trust? Set in the lands of Northeast Brazil, this is an account of the everyday experience of scarcity, sickness and death that centres on the lives of the women and children of a hillside "favela". Bringing her readers to the impoverished slopes above the modern plantation town of Bom Jesus de Mata, where she has worked on and off for 25 years, Nancy Scheper-Hughes follows three generations of shantytown women...

Commodifying Bodies

Nancy Scheper-Hughes
Loïc Wacquant
2003

Edited by Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Loïc Wacquant - Increasingly the body is a possession that does not belong to us. It is bought and sold, bartered and stolen, marketed wholesale or in parts. The professions - especially reproductive medicine, transplant surgery, and bioethics but also journalism and other cultural specialists - have been pliant partners in this accelerating commodification of live and dead human organisms. Under the guise of healing or research, they have contributed to a new 'ethic of parts' for which the divisible body is severed from the self, torn...

Una "enfermedad monstruo:" Indigenas derribando el cerco de la discriminacion racial en salud (A Monster Disease: Indigenous Peoples Breaking Down the Wall of Health-Based Discrimination)

Charles Briggs
Enrique Moraleda Izco
Norbelys Gómez
Conrado Moraleda Izco
Tirso Gómez
Clara Mantini-Briggs
2015

By Charles L. Briggs, Enrique Moraleda Izco, Norbelys Gómez, Conrado Moraleda Izco, Tirso Gómez, and Clara Mantini-Briggs Entre 2007 y 2008, una enfermedad misteriosa mató a 38 niños, niñas y jóvenes indígenas warao en Delta Amacuro, Venezuela. Médicos, epidemiólogos y curadores fracasaron en diagnosticarla. La epidemia ocurrió en uno de los contextos más favorables en materia de salud pública, una prioridad para el gobierno revolucionario del presidente Hugo Chávez Frías. Sin embargo, los acontecimientos narrados en este libro ponen de...

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-...

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...

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 University of California (UC) campuses and departments, along...

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...