front cover of Faith and the Pursuit of Health
Faith and the Pursuit of Health
Cardiometabolic Disorders in Samoa
Hardin, Jessica
Rutgers University Press, 2019
Faith and the Pursuit of Health explores how Pentecostal Christians manage chronic illness in ways that sheds light on health disparities and social suffering in Samoa, a place where rates of obesity and related cardiometabolic disorders have reached population-wide levels. Pentecostals grapple with how to maintain the health of their congregants in an environment that fosters cardiometabolic disorders. They find ways to manage these forms of sickness and inequality through their churches and the friendships developed within these institutions. Examining how Pentecostal Christianity provides many Samoans with tools to manage day-to-day issues around health and sickness, Jessica Hardin argues for understanding the synergies between how Christianity and biomedicine practice chronicity. 
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front cover of Fault Lines of Care
Fault Lines of Care
Gender, HIV, and Global Health in Bolivia
Heckert, Carina
Rutgers University Press, 2018
The HIV epidemic in Bolivia has received little attention on a global scale in light of the country’s low HIV prevalence rate. However, by profiling the largest city in this land-locked Latin American country, Carina Heckert shows how global health-funded HIV care programs at times clash with local realities, which can have catastrophic effects for people living with HIV who must rely on global health resources to survive. These ethnographic insights, as a result, can be applied to AIDS programs across the globe.
 
In Fault Lines of Care, Heckert provides a detailed examination of the effects of global health and governmental policy decisions on the everyday lives of people living with HIV in Santa Cruz. She focuses on the gendered dynamics that play a role in the development and implementation of HIV care programs and shows how decisions made from above impact what happens on the ground.  
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Fistula Politics
Birthing Injuries and the Quest for Continence in Niger
Heller, Alison
Rutgers University Press, 2019
Obstetric fistula is a birthing injury caused by prolonged obstructed labor that results in urinary and fecal incontinence. It is nearly non-existent in the Global North. In contrast Niger, in West Africa, has one of the highest rates of fistula in the world. In Western humanitarian and media narratives, fistula is presented as deeply stigmatizing, resulting in divorce, abandonment by kin, exile from communities, depression and suicide. In Fistula Politics, Alison Heller illustrates the inaccuracy of these popular narratives and shows how they serve the interests not of the women so affected, but of humanitarian organizations, the media, and local clinics.  
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Food, Genes, and Culture
Eating Right for Your Origins
Gary Paul Nabhan
Island Press, 2014

Vegan, low fat, low carb, slow carb: Every diet seems to promise a one-size-fits-all solution to health. But they ignore the diversity of human genes and how they interact with what we eat.

In Food, Genes, and Culture, renowned ethnobotanist Gary Nabhan shows why the perfect diet for one person could be disastrous for another. If your ancestors were herders in Northern Europe, milk might well provide you with important nutrients, whereas if you’re Native American, you have a higher likelihood of lactose intolerance. If your roots lie in the Greek islands, the acclaimed Mediterranean diet might save your heart; if not, all that olive oil could just give you stomach cramps.

Nabhan traces food traditions around the world, from Bali to Mexico, uncovering the links between ancestry and individual responses to food. The implications go well beyond personal taste. Today’s widespread mismatch between diet and genes is leading to serious health conditions, including a dramatic growth over the last 50 years in auto-immune and inflammatory diseases.

Readers will not only learn why diabetes is running rampant among indigenous peoples and heart disease has risen among those of northern European descent, but may find the path to their own perfect diet.


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front cover of For Love or Money
For Love or Money
Care Provision in the United States
Nancy Folbre
Russell Sage Foundation, 2013
As women moved into the formal labor force in large numbers over the last forty years, care work – traditionally provided primarily by women – has increasingly shifted from the family arena to the market. Child care, elder care, care for the disabled, and home care now account for a growing segment of low-wage work in the United States, and demand for such work will only increase as the baby boom generation ages. But the expanding market provision of care has created new economic anxieties and raised pointed questions: Why do women continue to do most care work, both paid and unpaid? Why does care work remain low paid when the quality of care is so highly valued? How effective and equitable are public policies toward dependents in the United States? In For Love and Money, an interdisciplinary team of experts explores the theoretical dilemmas of care provision and provides an unprecedented empirical overview of the looming problems for the care sector in the United States. Drawing on diverse disciplines and areas of expertise, For Love and Money develops an innovative framework to analyze existing care policies and suggest potential directions for care policy and future research. Contributors Paula England, Nancy Folbre, and Carrie Leana explore the range of motivations for caregiving, such as familial responsibility or limited job prospects, and why both love and money can be efficient motivators. They also examine why women tend to specialize in the provision of care, citing factors like job discrimination, social pressure, or the personal motivation to provide care reported by many women. Suzanne Bianchi, Nancy Folbre, and Douglas Wolf estimate how much unpaid care is being provided in the United States and show that low-income families rely more on unpaid family members for their child and for elder care than do affluent families. With low wages and little savings, these families often find it difficult to provide care and earn enough money to stay afloat. Candace Howes, Carrie Leana and Kristin Smith investigate the dynamics within the paid care sector and find problematic wages and working conditions, including high turnover, inadequate training and a “pay penalty” for workers who enter care jobs. These conditions have consequences: poor job quality in child care and adult care also leads to poor care quality. In their chapters, Janet Gornick, Candace Howes and Laura Braslow provide a systematic inventory of public policies that directly shape the provision of care for children or for adults who need personal assistance, such as family leave, child care tax credits and Medicaid-funded long-term care. They conclude that income and variations in states’ policies are the greatest factors determining how well, and for whom, the current system works. Despite the demand for care work, very little public policy attention has been devoted to it. Only three states, for example, have enacted paid family leave programs. Paid or unpaid, care costs those who provide it. At the heart of For Love and Money is the understanding that the quality of care work in the United States matters not only for those who receive care but also for society at large, which benefits from the nurturance and maintenance of human capabilities. As care work gravitates from the family to the formal economy, this volume clarifies the pressing need for America to fundamentally rethink its care policies and increase public investment in this increasingly crucial sector.
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Forget Burial
HIV Kinship, Disability, and Queer/Trans Narratives of Care
Marty Fink
Rutgers University Press, 2021
Finalist for the LGBTQ Nonfiction Award from Lambda Literary

Queers and trans people in the 1980s and early ‘90s were dying of AIDS and the government failed to care. Lovers, strangers, artists, and community activists came together take care of each other in the face of state violence. In revisiting these histories alongside ongoing queer and trans movements, this book uncovers how early HIV care-giving narratives actually shape how we continue to understand our genders and our disabilities. The queer and trans care-giving kinships that formed in response to HIV continue to inspire how we have sex and build chosen families in the present. In unearthing HIV community newsletters, media, zines, porn, literature, and even vampires, Forget Burial bridges early HIV care-giving activisms with contemporary disability movements. In refusing to bury the legacies of long-term survivors and of those we have lost, this book brings early HIV kinships together with ongoing movements for queer and trans body self-determination.
 
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Forgotten Bodies
Imperialism, Chuukese Migration, and Stratified Reproduction in Guam
Sarah A. Smith
Rutgers University Press, 2024
Women from Chuuk, Federated States of Micronesia, who migrate to Guam, a U.S. territory, suffer disproportionately poor reproductive health outcomes. Though their access to the United States is unusually easy, through a unique migration agreement, it keeps them in a perpetual liminal state as nonimmigrants, who never fully belong as part of the United States Chuukese women move to Guam, sometimes with their families but sometimes alone, in search of a better life: for jobs, for the education system, or to access safe health care. Yet, the imperial system they encounter creates underlying conditions that greatly and disproportionately impact their ability to succeed and thrive, negatively impacting their reproductive health. Through clinical and community ethnography, Sarah A. Smith illuminates the way this system stratifies women’s reproduction at structural, social, and individual levels. Readers can visualize how U.S. imperialist policies of benign neglect control the body politic, change the social body, and render individual bodies vulnerable in the twenty-first century but also how people resist.
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front cover of From Crisis to Catastrophe
From Crisis to Catastrophe
Care, COVID, and Pathways to Change
Mignon Duffy
Rutgers University Press, 2023
The COVID pandemic has shaken the material and social foundations of the world more than any event in recent history and has highlighted and exacerbated a longstanding crisis of care. While these challenges may be freshly visible to the public, they are not new. Over the last three decades, a growing body of care scholarship has documented the inadequacy of the social organization of care around the world, and the effect of the devaluation of care on workers, families, and communities. In this volume, a diverse group of care scholars bring their expertise to bear on this recent crisis. In doing so, they consider the ways in which the existing social organization of care in different countries around the globe amplified or mitigated the impact of COVID. They also explore the global pandemic's impact on the conditions of care and  its role in exacerbating deeply rooted gender, race, migration, disability, and other forms of inequality.
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front cover of From Residency to Retirement
From Residency to Retirement
Physicians' Careers over a Professional Lifetime
Terry Mizrahi
Rutgers University Press, 2021
From Residency to Retirement tells the stories of twenty American doctors over the last half century, which saw a period of continuous, turbulent, and transformative changes to the U.S. health care system. The cohort’s experiences are reflective of the generation of physicians who came of age as presidents Carter and Reagan began to focus on costs and benefits of health services.
 
Mizrahi observed and interviewed these physicians in six timeframes ending in 2016. Beginning with medical school in the mid-1970s, these physicians reveal the myriad fluctuations and uncertainties in their professional practice, working conditions, collegial relationships, and patient interactions. In their own words, they provide a “view from the front lines” both in academic and community settings. They disclose the satisfactions and strains in coping with macro policies enacted by government and insurance companies over their career trajectory.
 
They describe their residency in internal medicine in a large southern urban medical center as a “siege mentality” which lessened as they began their careers, in Getting Rid of Patients, the title of Mizrahi’s first book (1986). As these doctors moved on in their professional lives more of their experiences were discussed in terms of dissatisfaction with financial remuneration, emotional gratification, and intellectual fulfillment. Such moments of career frustration, however, were also interspersed with moments of satisfaction at different stages of their medical careers. Particularly revealing was whether they were optimistic about the future at each stage of their career and whether they would recommend a medical career to their children. Mizrahi's subjects also divulge their private feelings of disillusionment and fear of failure given the malpractice epidemic and lawsuits threatened or actually brought against so many doctors. Mizrahi’s work, covering almost fifty years, provides rarely viewed insights into the lives of physicians over a professional life span.
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front cover of From Skepticism to Competence
From Skepticism to Competence
How American Psychiatrists Learn Psychotherapy
Mariana Craciun
University of Chicago Press, 2024
An examination of how novice psychiatrists come to understand the workings of the mind—and the nature of medical expertise—as they are trained in psychotherapy.
 
While many medical professionals can physically examine the body to identify and understand its troubles—a cardiologist can take a scan of the heart, an endocrinologist can measure hormone levels, an oncologist can locate a tumor—psychiatrists have a much harder time unlocking the inner workings of the brain or its metaphysical counterpart, the mind.  

In From Skepticism to Competence, sociologist Mariana Craciun delves into the radical uncertainty of psychiatric work by following medical residents in the field as they learn about psychotherapeutic methods. Most are skeptical at the start. While they are well equipped to treat brain diseases through prescription drugs, they must set their expectations aside and learn how to navigate their patients’ minds. Their instructors, experienced psychotherapists, help the budding psychiatrists navigate this new professional terrain by revealing the inner workings of talk and behavioral interventions and stressing their utility in a world dominated by pharmaceutical treatments. In the process, the residents examine their own doctoring assumptions and develop new competencies in psychotherapy. Exploring the world of contemporary psychiatric training, Craciun illuminates novice physicians’ struggles to understand the nature and meaning of mental illness and, with it, their own growing medical expertise.
 
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