BCSM Books

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-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....

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...

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...