Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies : Migrant Farmworkers in the United States
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With a new preface and a new epilogue co-written with Jorge Ramirez-Lopez, this updated edition of Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies provides an intimate examination of the everyday lives, suffering, and resistance of Mexican migrants in our contemporary food system. Seth Holmes, an anthropologist and MD in the mold of Paul Farmer and Didier Fassin, shows how market forces, anti-immigrant sentiment, and racism undermine health and health care. Holmes was invited to trek with his companions clandestinely 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 United States, planted and harvested corn, picked strawberries, and accompanied sick workers to clinics and hospitals. This "embodied anthropology" deepens our theoretical understanding of the ways in which social inequities come to be perceived as normal and natural in society and in health care. In a new epilogue, Holmes and Indigenous Oaxacan scholar Jorge Ramirez-Lopez provide a substantive update about the protagonists in the book, focusing on the ways in which they have been involved individually and collectively in movements for Indigenous immigrant rights, farmworker rights, and the right to health over the last decade.
Below are some books in Tripod just to show a range of possible topics as you brainstorm.
Fevers, Feuds, and Diamonds: Ebola and the Ravages of History
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"Paul Farmer brings his considerable intellect, empathy, and expertise to bear in this powerful and deeply researched account of the Ebola outbreak that struck West Africa in 2014. It is hard to imagine a more timely or important book." --Bill and Melinda Gates "[The] history is as powerfully conveyed as it is tragic . . . Illuminating . . . Invaluable." --Steven Johnson, The New York Times Book Review In 2014, Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Guinea suffered the worst epidemic of Ebola in history. The brutal virus spread rapidly through a clinical desert where basic health-care facilities were few and far between. Causing severe loss of life and economic disruption, the Ebola crisis was a major tragedy of modern medicine. But why did it happen, and what can we learn from it? Paul Farmer, the internationally renowned doctor and anthropologist, experienced the Ebola outbreak firsthand--Partners in Health, the organization he founded, was among the international responders. In Fevers, Feuds, and Diamonds, he offers the first substantive account of this frightening, fast-moving episode and its implications. In vibrant prose, Farmer tells the harrowing stories of Ebola victims while showing why the medical response was slow and insufficient. Rebutting misleading claims about the origins of Ebola and why it spread so rapidly, he traces West Africa's chronic health failures back to centuries of exploitation and injustice. Under formal colonial rule, disease containment was a priority but care was not - and the region's health care woes worsened, with devastating consequences that Farmer traces up to the present. This thorough and hopeful narrative is a definitive work of reportage, history, and advocacy, and a crucial intervention in public-health discussions around the world.
Pathologies of Power : Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor.
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Pathologies of Power uses harrowing stories of life--and death--in extreme situations to interrogate our understanding of human rights. Paul Farmer, a physician and anthropologist with twenty years of experience working in Haiti, Peru, and Russia, argues that promoting the social and economic rights of the world's poor is the most important human rights struggle of our times. With passionate eyewitness accounts from the prisons of Russia and the beleaguered villages of Haiti and Chiapas, this book links the lived experiences of individual victims to a broader analysis of structural violence. Farmer challenges conventional thinking within human rights circles and exposes the relationships between political and economic injustice, on one hand, and the suffering and illness of the powerless, on the other. Farmer shows that the same social forces that give rise to epidemic diseases such as HIV and tuberculosis also sculpt risk for human rights violations. He illustrates the ways that racism and gender inequality in the United States are embodied as disease and death. Yet this book is far from a hopeless inventory of abuse. Farmer's disturbing examples are linked to a guarded optimism that new medical and social technologies will develop in tandem with a more informed sense of social justice. Otherwise, he concludes, we will be guilty of managing social inequality rather than addressing structural violence. Farmer's urgent plea to think about human rights in the context of global public health and to consider critical issues of quality and access for the world's poor should be of fundamental concern to a world characterized by the bizarre proximity of surfeit and suffering.
How to Be Disabled in a Pandemic
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A chronicle of ableism and disability activism in New York City during the COVID-19 pandemic How to Be Disabled in a Pandemic documents the pivotal experiences of disabled people living in an early epicenter of COVID-19: New York City. Among those hardest hit by the pandemic, disability communities across the five boroughs have been disproportionately impacted by city and national policies, work and housing conditions, stigma, racism, and violence--as much as by the virus itself. Disabled and chronically-ill activists have protested plans for medical rationing and refuted the eugenic logic of mainstream politicians and journalists who "reassure" audiences that only older people and those with disabilities continue to die from COVID-19. At the same time, as exemplified by the viral hashtag #DisabledPeopleToldYou, disability expertise has become widely recognized in practices such as accessible remote work and education, quarantine, and distributed networks of support and mutual aid. This edited volume charts the legacies of this "mass disabling event" for uncertain viral futures, exploring the dialectic between disproportionate risk and the creativity of a disability justice response. How to Be Disabled in a Pandemic includes contributions by wide-ranging disability scholars, writers, and activists whose research and lived experiences chronicle the pandemic's impacts in prisons, migrant detention centers, Chinatown senior centers, hospitals in Queens and the Bronx, subways, schools, housing shelters, social media, and other locations of public and private life. By focusing on New York City over the course of three years, the book reveals key themes of the pandemic, including hierarchies of disability "vulnerability," the deployment of disability as a tool of population management, and innovative crip pandemic cultural production. How to Be Disabled in a Pandemic honors those lost, as well as those who survived, by calling for just policies and caring infrastructures, not only in times of crisis but for the long haul.
The Construction of Eating Disorders
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This ground breaking book draws on original research to critically examine the construction of eating disorders and disordered eating, in an analysis that encompasses psychiatry, cultural representations, and the politics of eating disorders. Challenging the idea that disordered eating is an individual, marginal issue, the book explores how disordered eating, and the classification of eating disorders (EDs), reflect deep societal disruptions, regulatory practices, and sometimes violent attempts to manage non-conformity. It demonstrates the impact of biomedical, psychiatric, legal, pharmaceutical, technical and consumer groups, as well as that of the fast-food, fashion, media and social media industries. Novel areas explored include eating disorders and the justice system, eating disorders and food landscapes, "lifestyle" eating disorders, and the role of capitalism and colonialism in the emerging biopolitics of food and bodies. Centrally, it reveals how these forces shape the ways that eating disorders are perceived, spoken of, written about, and managed within institutions and wider society. The book will appeal to scholars and students of mental health, psychology, sociology, gender studies, criminology, food justice, and anyone interested in the future of our health.
Make America Fit Again: CrossFit’s Articulation with Authoritarian Populism
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This book critically examines the CrossFit phenomenon and makes the argument that CrossFit uses the rhetoric and tactics found in modern forms of authoritarian populism to rally adherents around its brand. CrossFit is a private branded fitness organization whose unorthodox methods and adversarial leadership has challenged dominant ideas around health and fitness worldwide. In exploring CrossFit's articulations with healthism and the obesity epidemic, the risk discourse of the prepper and survivalist movements, and the increasing valorization of the military and military personnel, Shaun E. Edmonds makes legible the ideological underpinnings of the CrossFit practice. After a deeper look at how CrossFit's variation of authoritarian populism has been used to counter critics and mobilize the community, the book concludes by considering what might be next for CrossFit following former CEO and co-founder Greg Glassman's controversial departure from the company.
Marked Women: The Cultural Politics of Cervical Cancer in Venezuela
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Cervical cancer is the third leading cause of death among women in Venezuela, with poor and working-class women bearing the brunt of it. Doctors and public health officials regard promiscuity and poor hygiene--coded indicators for low class, low culture, and bad morals--as risk factors for the disease. Drawing on in-depth fieldwork conducted in two oncology hospitals in Caracas, Marked Women is an ethnography of women's experiences with cervical cancer, the doctors and nurses who treat them, and the public health officials and administrators who set up intervention programs to combat the disease. Rebecca G. Martínez contextualizes patient-doctor interactions within a historical arc of Venezuelan nationalism, modernity, neoliberalism, and Chavismo to understand the scientific, social, and political discourses surrounding the disease. The women, marked as deviant for their sexual transgressions, are not only characterized as engaging in unhygienic, uncultured, and promiscuous behaviors, but also become embodiments of these very behaviors. Ultimately, Marked Women explores how epidemiological risk is a socially, culturally, and historically embedded process--and how this enables cervical cancer to stigmatize women as socially marginal, burdens on society, and threats to the "health" of the modern nation.
Politicising Polio: Disability, Civil Society and Civic Agency in Sierra Leone
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This book examines disability in post-war Sierra Leone. Its protagonists are polio-disabled people living in the nation's capital of Freetown, organizing themselves as best as they can in a state without welfare. There is little concrete support for people with disabilities in a country where the government is struggling with the competing requirements of the international community, demanding - in exchange for its support - good standards of democracy and the maintenance of a free market economy. To what extent is the Human Rights framework of the disability movement effective in protecting the polio-disabled and what are the limitations of this framework? Diana Szántó's detailed ethnography reveals, through many real-life examples, the vulnerability of disabled people living in the intersections of poverty, informality and disability activism. At the same time, it also tells about the many ways the polio-disabled community is transforming vulnerability into strength.
Sweetness in the Blood: Race, Risk, and Type 2 Diabetes
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A bold new indictment of the racialization of science Decades of data cannot be ignored: African American adults are far more likely to develop Type 2 diabetes than white adults. But has science gone so far in racializing diabetes as to undermine the search for solutions? In a rousing indictment of the idea that notions of biological race should drive scientific inquiry, Sweetness in the Blood provides an ethnographic picture of biotechnology's framings of Type 2 diabetes risk and race and, importantly, offers a critical examination of the assumptions behind the recruitment of African American and African-descent populations for Type 2 diabetes research. James Doucet-Battle begins with a historical overview of how diabetes has been researched and framed racially over the past century, chronicling one company's efforts to recruit African Americans to test their new diabetes risk-score algorithm with the aim of increasing the clinical and market value of the firm's technology. He considers African American reticence about participation in biomedical research and examines race and health disparities in light of advances in genomic sequencing technology. Doucet-Battle concludes by emphasizing that genomic research into sub-Saharan ancestry in fact underlines the importance of analyzing gender before attempting to understand the notion of race. No disease reveals this more than Type 2 diabetes. Sweetness in the Blood challenges the notion that the best approach to understanding, managing, and curing Type 2 diabetes is through the lens of race. It also transforms how we think about sugar, filling a neglected gap between the sugar- and molasses-sweetened past of the enslaved African laborer and the high-fructose corn syrup- and corporate-fed body of the contemporary consumer-laborer.
Viral Loads: Anthropologies of urgency in the time of COVID-19
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A diagnosis of global inequalities exploited by COVID-19 and how we might evolve. The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted some lives more than others. While more than half the world's population experienced physical restrictions in the wake of the virus, Viral Loads reveals how the international response placed disparate burdens on exploited communities across the globe. Contributors from six continents situate the pandemic within a highly connected yet exceedingly unequal world marked by fragmented communities, austere economies, and unstable governments. Ambitious in its scope, Viral Loads insists that medical anthropology must be part of any future efforts to build a new post-pandemic world.
