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.
 

How global health practices can end up reorganizing practices of care for the people and communities they seek to serve 

Commodities of Care examines the unanticipated effects of global health interventions, ideas, and practices as they unfold in communities of men who have sex with men (MSM) in China. Targeted for the scaling-up of HIV testing, Elsa L. Fan examines how the impact of this initiative has transformed these men from subjects of care into commodities of care: through the use of performance-based financing tied to HIV testing, MSM have become a source of economic and political capital. 

In ethnographic detail, Fan shows how this particular program, ushered in by global health donors, became the prevailing strategy to control the epidemic in China in the late 2000s. Fan examines the implementation of MSM testing and its effects among these men, arguing that the intervention produced new markets of men, driven by the push to meet testing metrics. 

Fan shows how men who have sex with men in China came to see themselves as part of a global “MSM” category, adopting new selfhoods and socialities inextricably tied to HIV and to testing. Wider trends in global health programming have shaped national public health responses in China and, this book reveals, have radically altered the ways health, disease, and care are addressed.