front cover of Cancer Entangled
Cancer Entangled
Anticipation, Acceleration, and the Danish State
Rikke Sand Andersen
Rutgers University Press, 2023
Cancer Entangled explores the shifts that took place in Denmark around the millennium, when health promoters set out to minimize delays in cancer diagnoses in hope of improving cancer survival. The authors suggest a temporal reframing of cancer control that emphasizes the importance of focusing on how people – potential patients as well as health care professionals – experience and anticipate cancer before a diagnosis or a prediction has been made. This argument compellingly challenges and augments anthropological work on cancer control that has privileged attention to the productive role of science and technology and to life with cancer or cancer risk. By offering rich ethnographic insights into the introduction of the first cancer vaccine, cancer signs and symptoms, public discourses on delays, social class and care seeking, cancer suspicion in the clinic, as well as the work on fast-track referral – the book convincingly situates cancer control in an ethical registrar involving attention to acceleration and time, showing how cancer waiting times become an index of the "state of the nation".
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The Cancer Within
Reproduction, Cultural Transformation, and Health Care in Romania
Cristina A. Pop
Rutgers University Press, 2022
The Cancer Within examines cervical cancer in Romania as a point of entry into an anthropological reflection on contemporary health care. Cervical cancer prevention reveals the inner workings of emerging post-communist medicine, which aligns the state and the market, public and private health care providers, policy makers, and ordinary women. Fashioned by patriarchal relations, lived religion, and the historical trauma of pronatalism, Romanian women’s responses to reproductive medicine and cervical cancer prevention are complicated by neoliberal reforms to medical care. Cervical cancer prevention – and especially the HPV vaccination – provided Romanians a legitimate instance to express their conflicting views of post-communist medicine. What sets Romania apart is that pronatalism, patriarchy, lived religion, medical reforms, and moral contestation of preventive medicine bring into line systemic contingencies that expose the historical, social, and cultural trajectories of cervical cancer.
 
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Capturing COVID
Media and the Pandemic in the Digital Era
Katherine A. Foss
University of Massachusetts Press, 2025

When health authorities quarantined guests aboard the Diamond Princess on February 5, 2020, the cruise ship abruptly shifted from a dream vacation vessel to a public health nightmare. Over the next three weeks, 712 passengers tested positive for coronavirus, with fourteen deaths, and the ship outbreak quickly became the largest cluster of cases outside of China. Guests began to routinely share quarantine updates on social media, ranging from the quality of the ship’s food to their sense of imprisonment. These Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok accounts became a key source of information for news outlets like the Associated Press, and they helped to set the tone for how the media would cover and frame the pandemic for the next several years.

Unlike past outbreaks, epidemics, and pandemics, COVID-19 emerged in a 21st-century digital landscape of instant communication and abundant online platforms, with older models of news and entertainment media mingling with new types of citizen-produced content. In Capturing COVID, Katherine A. Foss makes sense of how this contemporary media landscape shaped the public’s knowledge and perceptions of the new pandemic. The book focuses on crucial media moments, including the initial reporting from Wuhan; news and social media content on the Diamond Princess quarantine; stories of inequality, stigma, and injustice; narratives of the vaccine rollout; and representations of pandemic life in popular culture. Drawing on press releases, interviews, websites, blogs, social media posts, and other publicly available materials, and guided by critical media analysis, Foss illuminates how this new digital era profoundly shaped the progression of the pandemic. This media landscape kept people informed and connected, but also led to the politicization of the virus, rampant mis/disinformation, and stigmatizing messaging that contributed to public distrust and division. Capturing COVID deftly helps make sense of the entire affair.

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Care at a Distance
On the Closeness of Technology
Jeannette Pols
Amsterdam University Press, 2012
Often the switch to telecare—technology used to help caretakers provide treatment to their patients off-site—is portrayed as either a nightmare scenario or a much needed panacea for all our healthcare woes. This widely researched study probes what happens when technologies are used to provide healthcare at a distance. Drawing on ethnographic studies of both patients and nurses involved in telecare, Jeannette Pols demonstrates  that instead of resulting in less intensive care for patients, there is instead a staggering rise in the frequency of contact between nursing staff and their patients. Care at a Distance takes the theoretical framework of telecare and provides hard data about these innovative care practices, while producing an accurate portrayal of the pros and cons of telecare.
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Carrying On
Another School of Thought on Pregnancy and Health
Brittany Clair
Rutgers University Press, 2022
In the twenty-first century, expecting parents are inundated with information and advice from every direction, but are often strapped for perspective on how to think through it. Unlike traditional pregnancy guidebooks that offer recommendations, Carrying On helps expecting parents make sense of the overwhelming amount of counsel available to them by shedding light on where it all came from. How and why did such confusing and contradictory guidance on pregnancy come to exist?
 
Carrying On investigates the origin stories of prevailing prenatal health norms by exploring the evolution of issues at the center of pregnancy, ranging from morning sickness and weight gain to ultrasounds and induction. When did women start taking prenatal vitamins, and why? When did the notion that pregnant women should “eat for two” originate? Where did exercise guidelines come from? And when did women start formulating birth plans?
 
A learning project with one foot in the past and the other in the present, Carrying On considers what history and medicine together can teach us about how and why we treat pregnancy–and pregnant women–the way we do. In a world of information overload, Carrying On offers expecting parents the context and background they need to approach pregnancy and prenatal health from a new place of understanding.
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Children as Caregivers
The Global Fight against Tuberculosis and HIV in Zambia
Hunleth, Jean
Rutgers University Press, 2017
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The Children in Child Health
Negotiating Young Lives and Health in New Zealand
Julie Spray
Rutgers University Press, 2020
Who are the children in child health policy? How do they live and see the world, and why should we know them? A journey into the lives of children coping in a world compromised by poverty and inequality, The Children in Child Health challenges the invisibility of children’s perspectives in health policy and argues that paying attention to what children do is critical for understanding the practical and policy implications of these experiences.
 
In the unique context of indigenous Māori and migrant Pacific children in postcolonial New Zealand, Julie Spray explores the intertwining issues of epidemic disease, malnutrition, stress, violence, self-harm, and death to address the problem of how scholars and policy-makers alike can recognize and respond to children as social actors in their health. The Children in Child Health innovatively combines perspectives from childhood studies, medical anthropology, and public health and policy together with evocative ethnography to show how a deep understanding of children’s worlds can change our approach to their care.
 
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Chinese "Cancer Villages"
Rural Development, Environmental Change and Public Health
Ajiang Chen
Amsterdam University Press, 2020
The phenomenon of "cancer villages" has emerged in many parts of rural China, drawing media attention and becoming a fact of social life. However, the relationship between pollution and disease is often hard to discern. Through sociological analysis of several villages with different social and economic structures, the authors offer a comprehensive, historically grounded analysis of the coexistence between the incidence of cancer, environmental pollution and villagers’ lifestyles, as well as the perceptions, claims and responses of different actors. They situate the appearance of "cancer villages" in the context of social, economic and cultural change in China, tracing the evolution of the issue over two decades, and providing deep insights into the complex interactions and trade-offs between economic growth, environmental change and public health.
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Chronic Failures
Kidneys, Regimes of Care, and the Mexican State
Ciara Kierans
Rutgers University Press, 2020
Chronic Failures: Kidneys, Regimes of Care and the Mexican State is about Chronic Kidney Disease (CKD) and the relentless search for renal care lived out in the context of poverty, inequality and uneven welfare arrangements. Based on ethnographic research conducted in the state of Jalisco, this book documents the routes uninsured Mexican patients take in order to access resource intensive biotechnical treatments, that is, different modes of dialysis and organ transplantation. It argues that these routes are normalized, bureaucratically, socially and epidemiologically, and turned into a locus for exploitation and profit.  Without a coherent logic of healthcare access, negotiating regimes of renal care has catastrophic consequences for those with the least resources to expend in that effort. In carrying both the costs and the burden of care, the practices of patients without entitlement offer a critical vantage point on the interplay between the state, markets in healthcare and the sick body.
 
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Cities for Life
How Communities Can Recover from Trauma and Rebuild for Health
Jason Corburn
Island Press, 2021
Environmental Design Research Association (EDRA) Place Book Award Winner (2022)

What if cities around the world actively worked to promote the health and healing of all of their residents? Cities contribute to the traumas that cause unhealthy stress, with segregated neighborhoods, insecure housing, few playgrounds, environmental pollution, and unsafe streets, particularly for the poor and residents who are Black, Indigenous, and People of Color.

Some cities around the world are already helping their communities heal by investing more in peacemaking and parks than in policing; focusing on community decision-making instead of data surveillance; changing regulations to permit more libraries than liquor stores; and building more affordable housing than highways. These cities are declaring racism a public health and climate change crisis, and taking the lead in generating equitable outcomes.                

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. This means not only centering those most traumatized in decision-making, Corburn explains, but confronting historically discriminatory, exclusionary, and racist urban institutions, and promoting healing-focused practices, place-making, and public policies.
  
Cities for Life is essential reading for urban planning, design, healthcare, and public health professionals as they work to reverse entrenched institutional practices through new policies, rules, norms, and laws that address their damage and promote health and healing.
 
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Cleansing the City
Sanitary Geographies in Victorian London
Michelle Allen
Ohio University Press, 2008

Cleansing the City: Sanitary Geographies in Victorian Londonexplores not only the challenges faced by reformers as they strove toclean up an increasingly filthy city but the resistance to their efforts.Beginning in the 1830s, reform-minded citizens, under the banner of sanitaryimprovement, plunged into London’s dark and dirty spaces and returned withthe material they needed to promote public health legislation and magnificentprojects of sanitary engineering. Sanitary reform, however, was not alwaysmet with unqualified enthusiasm. While some improvements, such as slumclearances, the development of sewerage, and the embankment of the Thames,may have made London a cleaner place to live, these projects also destroyedand reshaped the built environment, and in doing so, altered the meanings andexperiences of the city.

From the novels of Charles Dickens and George Gissing to anonymous magazinearticles and pamphlets, resistance to reform found expression in the nostalgicappreciation of a threatened urban landscape and anxiety about domestic autonomyin an era of networked sanitary services. Cleansing the City emphasizes the disruptions and disorientation occasioned by purification—a process we are generally inclined to see as positive. By recovering these sometimes oppositional, sometimes ambivalent responses, Michelle Allen elevates a significant undercurrent of Victorian thought into the mainstream and thus provides insight into the contested nature of sanitary modernization.

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Closing the Cancer Divide
An Equity Imperative
Felicia Marie Knaul
Harvard University Press, 2012

Cancer has become a leading cause of death and disability and a serious yet unforeseen challenge to health systems in low- and middle-income countries. A protracted and polarized cancer transition is under way and fuels a concentration of preventable risk, illness, suffering, impoverishment from ill health, and death among poor populations. Closing this cancer divide is an equity imperative. The world faces a huge, unperceived cost of failure to take action that requires an immediate and large-scale global response.

Closing the Cancer Divide presents strategies for innovation in delivery, pricing, procurement, finance, knowledge-building, and leadership that can be scaled up by applying a diagonal approach to health system strengthening. The chapters provide evidence-based recommendations for developing programs, local and global policy-making, and prioritizing research. The cases and frameworks provide a guide for developing responses to the challenge of cancer and other chronic illnesses. The book summarizes results of the Global Task Force on Expanding Access to Cancer Care and Control in Developing Countries, a collaboration among leaders from the global health and cancer care communities worldwide, originally convened by Harvard University. It includes contributions from civil society, global and national policy-makers, patients and practitioners, and academics representing an array of fields.

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Colonial Fantasies, Imperial Realities
Race Science and the Making of Polishness on the Fringes of the German Empire, 1840–1920
Lenny A. Ureña Valerio
Ohio University Press, 2019

In Colonial Fantasies, Imperial Realities, Lenny Ureña Valerio offers a transnational approach to Polish-German relations and nineteenth-century colonial subjectivities. She investigates key cultural dynamics in the history of medicine, colonialism, and migration that bring Germany and Prussian Poland closer to the colonial and postcolonial worlds in Africa and Latin America. She also analyzes how Poles in the German Empire positioned themselves in relation to Germans and native populations in overseas colonies. She thus recasts Polish perspectives and experiences, allowing new insights into identity formation and nationalist movements within the German Empire.

Crucially, Ureña Valerio also studies the medical projects and scientific ideas that traveled from colonies to the German metropole, and vice versa, which were influential not only in the racialization of Slavic populations, but also in bringing scientific conceptions of race to the everydayness of the German Empire. As a whole, Colonial Fantasies, Imperial Realities illuminates nested imperial and colonial relations using sources that range from medical texts and state documents to travel literature and fiction. By studying these scientific and political debates, Ureña Valerio uncovers novel ways to connect medicine, migration, and colonialism and provides an invigorating model for the analysis of Polish history from a global perspective.

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Communities of Health Care Justice
Galarneau, Charlene
Rutgers University Press, 2016
The factions debating health care reform in the United States have gravitated toward one of two positions: that just health care is an individual responsibility or that it must be regarded as a national concern. Both arguments overlook a third possibility: that justice in health care is multilayered and requires the participation of multiple and diverse communities. 
 
Communities of Health Care Justice makes a powerful ethical argument for treating communities as critical moral actors that play key roles in defining and upholding just health policy. Drawing together the key community dimensions of health care, and demonstrating their neglect in most prominent theories of health care justice, Charlene Galarneau postulates the ethical norms of community justice. In the process, she proposes that while the subnational communities of health care justice are defined by shared place, including those bound by culture, religion, gender, and race that together they define justice. 
 
As she constructs her innovative theorization of health care justice, Galarneau also reveals its firm grounding in the work of real-world health policy and community advocates. Communities of Health Care Justice not only strives to imagine a new framework of just health care, but also to show how elements of this framework exist in current health policy, and to outline the systemic, conceptual, and structural changes required to put these justice norms into fuller practice.
 
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Community Organizing and Community Building for Health and Social Equity, 4th edition
Meredith Minkler and Patricia Wakimoto
Rutgers University Press, 2022
The fourth edition of Community Organizing and Community Building for Health and Social Equity provides both classic and recent contributions to the field, with a special accent on how these approaches can contribute to health and social equity. The 23 chapters offer conceptual frameworks, skill- building and case studies in areas like coalition building, organizing by and with women of color, community assessment, and the power of the arts, the Internet, social media, and policy and media advocacy in such work. The use of participatory evaluation and strategies and tips on fundraising for community organizing also are presented, as are the ethical challenges that can arise in this work, and helpful tools for anticipating and addressing them. Also included are study questions for use in the classroom. 
 
Many of the book’s contributors are leaders in their academic fields, from public health and social work, to community psychology and urban and regional planning, and to social and political science. One author was the 44th president of the United States, himself a former community organizer in Chicago, who reflects on his earlier vocation and its importance. Other contributors are inspiring community leaders whose work on-the-ground and in partnership with us “outsiders” highlights both the power of collaboration, and the cultural humility and other skills required to do it well. 

Throughout this book, and particularly in the case studies and examples shared, the role of context is critical, and never far from view. Included here most recently are the horrific and continuing toll of the COVID-19 pandemic, and a long overdue, yet still greatly circumscribed, “national reckoning with systemic racism,” in the aftermath of the brutal police killing of yet another unarmed Black person, and then another and another, seemingly without  end. In many chapters, the authors highlight different facets of the Black Lives Matter movement that  took on new life across the country and the world in response to these atrocities.  In other chapters, the existential threat of climate change and grave threats to democracy also are underscored.

View the Table of Contents and introductory text for the supplementary instructor resources. (https://d3tto5i5w9ogdd.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/04143046/9781978832176_optimized_sampler.pdf)

Supplementary instructor resources are available on request: https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/communityorganizing
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Community Organizing and Community Building for Health and Welfare
Edited by Meredith Minkler
Rutgers University Press, 2012

The third edition of Community Organizing and Community Building for Health and Welfare provides new and more established ways to approach community building and organizing, from collaborating with communities on assessment and issue selection to using the power of coalition building, media advocacy, and social media to enhance the effectiveness of such work.

With a strong emphasis on cultural relevance and humility, this collection offers a wealth of case studies in areas ranging from childhood obesity to immigrant worker rights to health care reform. A "tool kit" of appendixes includes guidelines for assessing coalition effectiveness, exercises for critical reflection on our own power and privilege, and training tools such as "policy bingo." From former organizer and now President Barack Obama to academics and professionals in the fields of public health, social work, urban planning, and community psychology, the book offers a comprehensive vision and on-the-ground examples of the many ways community building and organizing can help us address some of the most intractable health and social problems of our times.

Dr. Minkler's course syllabus: Although Dr. Minkler has changed the order of some chapters in the syllabus to accommodate guest speakers and help students prep for the midterm assignment she uses, she arranged the actual book layout in a way that should flow quite naturally if instructors wish to use it in the order in which chapters appear.
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Complicated Lives
Girls, Parents, Drugs, and Juvenile Justice
Lopez, Vera
Rutgers University Press, 2017
Winner of the 2019 Intersectional Book Award from the American Society of Criminology's Division on Women & Crime​

Complicated Lives focuses on the lives of sixty-five drug-using girls in the juvenile justice system (living in group homes, a residential treatment center, and a youth correctional facility) who grew up in families characterized by parental drug use, violence, and child maltreatment. Vera Lopez situates girls’ relationships with parents who fail to live up to idealized parenting norms and examines how these relationships change over time, and ultimately contribute to the girls’ future drug use and involvement in the justice system.  
 
While Lopez’s subjects express concerns and doubt in their chances for success, Lopez provides an optimistic prescription for reform and improvement of the lives of these young women and presents a number of suggestions ranging from enhanced cultural competency training for all juvenile justice professionals to developing stronger collaborations between youth and adult serving systems and agencies.
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Conceiving Masculinity
Male Infertility, Medicine, and Identity
Liberty Walther Barnes
Temple University Press, 2014

In Conceiving Masculinity, Liberty Walther Barnes puts the world of male infertility under the microscope to examine how culturally pervasive notions of gender shape our understanding of disease, and how disease impacts our personal ideas about gender. 

 

Taking readers inside male infertility clinics, and interviewing doctors and couples dealing with male infertility, Barnes provides a rich account of the social aspects of the confusing and frustrating diagnosis of infertility. She explains why men resist a stigmatizing label like "infertile," and how men with poor fertility redefine for themselves what it means to be manly and masculine in a society that prizes male virility. Conceiving Masculinity also details how and why men embrace medical technologies and treatment for infertility.

 

Broaching a socially taboo topic, Barnes emphasizes that infertility is not just a women's issue. She shows how gender and disease are socially constructed within social institutions and by individuals. 

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Constructing the Outbreak
Epidemics in Media and Collective Memory
Katherine A. Foss
University of Massachusetts Press, 2020
When an epidemic strikes, media outlets are central to how an outbreak is framed and understood. While reporters construct stories intended to inform the public and convey essential information from doctors and politicians, news narratives also serve as historical records, capturing sentiments, responses, and fears throughout the course of the epidemic.

Constructing the Outbreak demonstrates how news reporting on epidemics communicates more than just information about pathogens; rather, prejudices, political agendas, religious beliefs, and theories of disease also shape the message. Analyzing seven epidemics spanning more than two hundred years—from Boston's smallpox epidemic and Philadelphia's yellow fever epidemic in the eighteenth century to outbreaks of diphtheria, influenza, and typhoid in the early twentieth century—Katherine A. Foss discusses how shifts in journalism and medicine influenced the coverage, preservation, and fictionalization of different disease outbreaks. Each case study highlights facets of this interplay, delving into topics such as colonization, tourism, war, and politics. Through this investigation into what has been preserved and forgotten in the collective memory of disease, Foss sheds light on current health care debates, like vaccine hesitancy.
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Contagious
Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative
Priscilla Wald
Duke University Press, 2008
How should we understand the fear and fascination elicited by the accounts of communicable disease outbreaks that proliferated, following the emergence of HIV, in scientific publications and the mainstream media? The repetition of particular characters, images, and story lines—of Patients Zero and superspreaders, hot zones and tenacious microbes—produced a formulaic narrative as they circulated through the media and were amplified in popular fiction and film. The “outbreak narrative” begins with the identification of an emerging infection, follows it through the global networks of contact and contagion, and ends with the epidemiological work that contains it. Priscilla Wald argues that we need to understand the appeal and persistence of the outbreak narrative because the stories we tell about disease emergence have consequences. As they disseminate information, they affect survival rates and contagion routes. They upset economies. They promote or mitigate the stigmatizing of individuals, groups, locales, behaviors, and lifestyles.

Wald traces how changing ideas about disease emergence and social interaction coalesced in the outbreak narrative. She returns to the early years of microbiology—to the identification of microbes and “Typhoid Mary,” the first known healthy human carrier of typhoid in the United States—to highlight the intertwined production of sociological theories of group formation (“social contagion”) and medical theories of bacteriological infection at the turn of the twentieth century. Following the evolution of these ideas, Wald shows how they were affected by—or reflected in—the advent of virology, Cold War ideas about “alien” infiltration, science-fiction stories of brainwashing and body snatchers, and the HIV/AIDS pandemic. Contagious is a cautionary tale about how the stories we tell circumscribe our thinking about global health and human interactions as the world imagines—or refuses to imagine—the next Great Plague.

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COVID and...
How to Do Rhetoric in a Pandemic
Emily Winderman
Michigan State University Press, 2023
Covid and . . . How To Do Rhetoric in a Pandemic is among the first edited collections to consider how rhetoric shapes Covid’s disease trajectory. Arguing that the circulation of any virus must be understood in tandem with the public communication accompanying it, this collection converses with interdisciplinary stakeholders also committed to the project of social wellness during pandemic times. With inventive ways of thinking about structural inequities in health, these essays showcase the forces that pandemic rhetoric exerts across health conditions, politics, and histories of social injustice.
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A COVID Charter, A Better World
Toby Miller
Rutgers University Press, 2021
With unprecedented speed, scientists have raced to develop vaccines to bring the COVID-19 pandemic under control and restore a sense of normalcy to our lives. Despite the havoc and disruption the pandemic has caused, it’s exposed exactly why we should not return to life as we once knew it. Our current profit-driven healthcare systems have exacerbated global inequality and endangered public health, and we must take this opportunity to construct a new social order that understands public health as a basic human right.  
 
A COVID Charter, A Better World outlines the steps needed to reform public policies and fix the structural vulnerabilities that the current pandemic has made so painfully clear. Leading scholar Toby Miller argues that we must resist neoliberalism’s tendency to view health in terms of individual choices and market-driven solutions, because that fails to preserve human rights. He addresses the imbalance of geopolitical power to explain how we arrived at this point and shows that the pandemic is more than just a virus—it’s a social disease. By examining how the U.S., Britain, Mexico, and Colombia have responded to the COVID-19 crisis, Miller investigates corporate, scientific, and governmental decision-making and the effects those decisions have had on disadvantaged local communities. Drawing from human rights charters ratified by various international organizations, he then proposes a COVID charter, calling for a new world that places human lives above corporate profits.
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COVID-19 and Public Health
Global Responses to the Pandemic
Caroline Kingori
Ohio University Press, 2024
This book contributes to the discourse on public health and COVID-19 prevention in three ways. First, by examining COVID-19’s impact on underserved and resource-limited communities, it addresses a continuing challenge in public health to ensure equitable access to adequate health care services. Contextually relevant initiatives must recognize and overcome injustices, stigma, racism, and discrimination in order to support the public health system. Second, the book argues that despite policies in high-income countries that led to the development and authorization of life-saving vaccines, attempts to curtail further transmission globally are futile without a concerted effort to ensure equal distribution of those vaccines. Third, it assesses the environmental impact of medical waste generated by COVID-19 as an emerging issue, one that cannot be glossed over with short-term solutions. Strategies to address medical waste like sanitizers, masks, gloves, and other products must be included in national policy to protect the populace and first responders. Utilizing a retrospective lens and examining lessons learned at the end of each chapter, COVID-19 and Public Health discusses global health success with other pandemics, risk communication, community engagement, interplay of policy and politics, environmental health influence, and public health practice implications. The book is suitable as an introductory text in public health or other related courses, such as environmental health, health policy, global health, health disparities, cross-cultural issues, community engagement, or health behavior. Contributors: Vashti Adams, Obasanjo Afolabi Bolarinwa, Adanna Agbo, Kobi V. Ajayi, Adaeze Aroh, Ugonwa Aroh, Timnit Berhane, Emma Biegacki, Claire Chaumont, Jaih Craddock, Marquitta Dorsey, Ghanem Elhersh, Kristen Garcia, Whitney Garney, Jessica Gokee LaRose, Jeffrey Glenn, F. Todd Gray, Rudene Haynes, Robert Heimer, Tamsim Hoque, Iman Ikram, Laeeq Khan, Kujang Laki, Rachel Ludeke, Devin Madden, Tyra Montour, Kenneth Morford, Michele Morrone, Maghboeba Mosavel, Carolyn Nganga-Good, Jerry Okal, Aggrey Willis Otieno, Sonya Panjwani, Elizabeth Prom-Wormley, Tremayne Robertson, Katie Schenk, Grace Sikapokoo, Vanessa Sheppard, Arnethea L. Sutton, Maria Thomson, Katherine Y. Tossas, Nita Vangeepuram, Pablo Villalobos Dintrans, Elizabeth Wachira, Robert A Winn, Rafeek Yusuf, Zenab Yusuf
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Criminalized Lives
HIV and Legal Violence
Alexander McClelland
Rutgers University Press, 2024
Canada has been known as a hot spot for HIV criminalization where the act of not disclosing one’s HIV-positive status to sex partners has historically been regarded as a serious criminal offence. Criminalized Lives describes how this approach has disproportionately harmed the poor, Black and Indigenous people, gay men, and women in Canada. In this book, people who have been criminally accused of not disclosing their HIV-positive status, detail the many complexities of disclosure, and the violence that results from being criminalized. 
 
Accompanied by portraits from artist Eric Kostiuk Williams, the profiles examine whether the criminal legal system is really prepared to handle the nuances and ethical dilemmas faced everyday by people living with HIV. By offering personal stories of people who have faced criminalization first-hand, Alexander McClelland questions common assumptions about HIV, the role of punishment, and the violence that results from the criminal legal system’s legacy of categorizing people as either victims or perpetrators. 
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Cultural Anxieties
Managing Migrant Suffering in France
Stéphanie Larchanche
Rutgers University Press, 2020
Cultural Anxieties is a gripping ethnography about Centre Minkowska, a transcultural psychiatry clinic in Paris, France. From her unique position as both observer and staff member, anthropologist Stéphanie Larchanché explores the challenges of providing non-stigmatizing mental healthcare to migrants. In particular, she documents how restrictive immigration policies, limited resources, and social anxieties about the “other” combine to constrain the work of state social and health service providers who refer migrants to the clinic and who tend to frame "migrant suffering" as a problem of integration that requires cultural expertise to address. In this context, Larchanché describes how staff members at Minkowska struggle to promote cultural competence, which offers a culturally and linguistically sensitive approach to care while simultaneously addressing the broader structural factors that impact migrants’ mental health. Ultimately, Larchanché identifies practical routes for improving caregiving practices and promoting hospitality—including professional training, action research, and advocacy.
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