Results by title

101 books match the query 'Care' and 7 start with m

cover of Making Down Syndrome: Motherhood and Kinship Futures in Urban Jordan

Making Down Syndrome

Motherhood and Kinship Futures in Urban Jordan

Christine Sargent

Rutgers University Press, 2026

Making Down Syndrome: Motherhood and Kinship Futures in Urban Jordan draws on ethnographic research conducted primarily in Jordan’s capital city of Amman to explore how the label and identity of Down syndrome is gaining increasing cohesiveness. Focused on the experiences of mothers, who serve as an entry point for understanding broader family dynamics and choices, the book argues that practices and ideologies of care play a central role in making Down syndrome’s embodied and political realities. They do so through the momentum of kinship futures, or futures imagined through the prism of kinship roles and relations, which shape how families organize and distribute care between and beyond kinship networks and under conditions of economic and political uncertainty. By approaching everyday life in Jordan through the lens of disability, Making Down Syndrome offers new insights into how people navigate structures of family, gender, power, inequality, and precarity, all while trying to maintain hope for and cultivate better futures.

[more]
cover of Managing Madness in the Community: The Challenge of Contemporary Mental Health Care

Managing Madness in the Community

The Challenge of Contemporary Mental Health Care

Kerry Michael Dobransky

Rutgers University Press, 0

 While mental illness and mental health care are increasingly recognized and accepted in today’s society, awareness of the most severely mentally ill—as well as those who care for them—is still dominated by stereotypes.  Managing Madness in the Community dispels the myth.  Readers will see how treatment options often depend on the social status, race, and gender of both clients and carers; how ideas in the field of mental health care—conflicting priorities and approaches—actually affect what happens on the ground; and how, amid the competing demands of clients and families, government agencies, bureaucrats and advocates, the fragmented American mental health system really works—or doesn’t.

In the wake of movies like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Shutter Island, most people picture the severely or chronically mentally ill being treated in cold, remote, and forbidding facilities.  But the reality is very different.  Today the majority of deeply troubled mental patients get treatment in nonprofit community organizations.  And it is to two such organizations in the Midwest that this study looks for answers.  Drawing upon a wealth of unique evidence—fifteen months of ethnographic observations, 91 interviews with clients and workers, and a range of documents—Managing Madness in the Community lays bare the sometimes disturbing nature and effects of our overly complex and disconnected mental health system.

Kerry Michael Dobransky examines the practical strategies organizations and their clients use to manage the often-conflicting demands of a host of constituencies, laws, and regulations.  Bringing to light the challenges confronting patients and staff of the community-based institutions that bear the brunt of caring for the mentally ill, his book provides a useful broad framework that will help researchers and policymakers understand the key forces influencing the mental health services system today.
[more]
cover of Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More than Human Worlds

Matters of Care

Speculative Ethics in More than Human Worlds

María Puig de la Bellacasa

University of Minnesota Press, 2017

To care can feel good, or it can feel bad. It can do good, it can oppress. But what is care? A moral obligation? A burden? A joy? Is it only human? In Matters of Care, María Puig de la Bellacasa presents a powerful challenge to conventional notions of care, exploring its significance as an ethical and political obligation for thinking in the more than human worlds of technoscience and naturecultures. 

Matters of Care contests the view that care is something only humans do, and argues for extending to non-humans the consideration of agencies and communities that make the living web of care by considering how care circulates in the natural world. The first of the book’s two parts, “Knowledge Politics,” defines the motivations for expanding the ethico-political meanings of care, focusing on discussions in science and technology that engage with sociotechnical assemblages and objects as lively, politically charged “things.” The second part, “Speculative Ethics in Antiecological Times,” considers everyday ecologies of sustaining and perpetuating life for their potential to transform our entrenched relations to natural worlds as “resources.” 

From the ethics and politics of care to experiential research on care to feminist science and technology studies, Matters of Care is a singular contribution to an emerging interdisciplinary debate that expands agency beyond the human to ask how our understandings of care must shift if we broaden the world.  

[more]
cover of Men, Care and Well-being in Super-aged Japan: Male Family Carers in a Society in Transition

Men, Care and Well-being in Super-aged Japan

Male Family Carers in a Society in Transition

Hiroko Costantini

University College London, 2026

A study of well-being and care within the evolving Japanese family context, with a focus on the men who care for older family members. 

Moving beyond the predominant focus on men in the workplace, Men, Care and Well-being in Super-aged Japan offers an innovative perspective on men’s well-being through their involvement in caring for older family members. Focusing on super-aged Japanese society, the book provides a valuable way to understand key social challenges relevant to countries on the cusp of an aging society. The book traces a shift away from the traditional family structures, highlighting how this transformation has reshaped men's roles within the family, and the increasingly important role of sons-in-law in extended family relations. 

[more]
cover of Migrant Labour in Global Factories: Care, welfare and government under market socialism in China and Vietnam

Migrant Labour in Global Factories

Care, welfare and government under market socialism in China and Vietnam

Jake Lin, Minh T. N. Nguyen, and Jingyu Mao

University College London, 2026

This interdisciplinary study investigates the unique challenges faced by migrant workers in the market socialist countries of China and Vietnam. 

The labor of hundreds of millions of internal migrant workers plays a crucial role for China and Vietnam’s national development and the expansion of global production chains in these market socialist countries. As the Communist party states have been promoting both marketization and welfare expansion since their respective reforms began, contradictions between the commodification and social protection of labor lead to significant obstacles to migrant workers’ welfare and well-being in the post-reform era.

Bringing into focus the connection between the reconfiguration of labor and changes in the two countries’ welfare systems, Migrant Labour in Global Factories analyzes how these contradictions shape the care of their huge migrant labor forces. It explores how they unfold in the historical and political contexts of both countries, bringing a range of relevant theories about welfare and social policymaking to bear on the features of the market socialist economy. The book argues that the evolving welfare systems in China and Vietnam fail to meaningfully address the social consequences of labor commodification in contexts where neoliberal development is instrumentalized to serve the political control and legitimacy of the party states. This is often at the cost of long-term and sustainable social policies for migrant labor in global factories.

[more]
cover of More-than-Human Aging: Animals, Robots, and Care in Later Life

More-than-Human Aging

Animals, Robots, and Care in Later Life

Cristina Douglas

Rutgers University Press, 2025

What does later life look like when it is lived in the companionship of other species? Similarly, how do other species age (or not) with humans, and what sort of (a)symmetries, if any, are brought to light around how we understand and think about aging? So far, aging has been investigated in the social sciences in purely human terms. This is the first collection of original work that considers aging as taking place in relation to other species. This volume aims to start a conversation about aging by taking its more-than-human participants seriously—that is, not only as a support for or context of human aging but also, more symmetrically, as agents and subjects in the process of aging. The contributors draw upon richly descriptive ethnographic accounts, including moments of connection between seniors and dogs in a long-term care facility, human care for aging laboratory animals, and robotic companionship in later life. The ethnographies in this volume not only enrich our understanding of more-than-human companionship during the human aging process but also challenge and urge us to rethink what it means to live later in life in ecologically entangled social and moral worlds.
[more]
cover of My Mother's Hip: Lessons From The World Of Eldercare

My Mother's Hip

Lessons From The World Of Eldercare

Luisa Margolies

Temple University Press, 2004

Some 400,000 hip fractures occur every year, the vast majority among the elderly; all too often these fractures are associated with death or severe disability. After her mother's double hip fracture, Luisa Margolies immersed herself in identifying and coordinating the services and professionals needed to provide critical care for an elderly person. She soon realized that the American medical system is ill prepared to deal with the long-term care needs of our graying society. The heart of My Mother's Hip is taken up with the author's day-to-day observations as her mother's condition worsened, then improved only to worsen again, while her father became increasingly anxious and disoriented. As both a devoted daughter and a skilled anthropologist, Margolies vividly renders her interactions with physicians, nurses, hospital workers, nursing home administrators, the Medicare bureaucracy, home care providers, and her parents. In the Lessons chapter that follows each episode, she discusses in a broader context the weighty decisions that adult children must make on their parents' behalf and the emotional toll their responsibility takes. Here she addresses the complex practical issues that commonly arise in such situations: understanding the consequences of hip fracture and its treatment, preparing health care proxies and advanced directives, enabling elders to remain at home, and the heartbreaking dilemma of prolonging life. Like many adult children, Margolies learned her lessons about eldercare in the midst of crises. This book is intended to ease the information-gathering and decision-making processes for others involved in eldercare.
[more]