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124 books match the query 'Health and hygiene' and 3 start with r

cover of Radical Health: Unwellness, Care, and Latinx Expressive Culture

Radical Health

Unwellness, Care, and Latinx Expressive Culture

Julie Avril Minich

Duke University Press, 2023

In Radical Health Julie Avril Minich examines the potential of Latinx expressive culture to intervene in contemporary health politics, elaborating how Latinx artists have critiqued ideologies of health that frame wellbeing in terms of personal behavior. Within this framework, poor health—obesity, asthma, diabetes, STIs, addiction, and high-risk pregnancies—is attributed to irresponsible lifestyle choices among the racialized poor. Countering this, Latinx writers and visual artists envision health not as individual duty but as communal responsibility. Bringing a disability justice approach to questions of health access and equity, Minich locates a concept of radical health within the work of Latinx artists, including the poetry of Rafael Campo, the music of Hurray for the Riff Raff, the fiction of Angie Cruz, and the performance art of Virginia Grise. Radical health operates as a modality that both challenges the stigma of unhealth and protests the social conditions that give rise to racial health disparities. Elaborating on this modality, Minich claims a critical role for Latinx artists in addressing the structural racism in public health. 
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cover of Remembering to Live: Illness at the Intersection of Anxiety and Knowledge in Rural Indonesia

Remembering to Live

Illness at the Intersection of Anxiety and Knowledge in Rural Indonesia

M. Cameron Hay

University of Michigan Press, 2004


Sasaks, a people of the Indonesian archipelago, cope with one of the country's worst health records by employing various medical traditions, including their own secret ethnomedical knowledge. But anxiety, in the presence and absence of illness, profoundly shapes the ways Sasaks use healing and knowledge. Hay addresses complex questions regarding cultural models, agency, and other relationships to conclude that the ethnomedical knowledge they use to cope with their illnesses ironically inhibits improvements in their health care.
M. Cameron Hay is a NSF Advance Fellow and an Assistant Adjunct Professor at the UCLA Center for Culture and Health.
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cover of Rhetorics of Refusal: Medical Dissent and the US-Somali Diaspora

Rhetorics of Refusal

Medical Dissent and the US-Somali Diaspora

Kari Campeau

The Ohio State University Press, 2025

Rhetorics of Refusal focuses on a recent public health crisis—Minnesota’s 2017 measles outbreak—to recast vaccine refusals less as products of poor health literacy or disinformation and more as strategic and generative acts of noncompliance. The outbreak, which primarily affected unvaccinated Somali children, occurred at the nexus of declining vaccination rates, spiking autism concerns, antivaccination predation, and a fraying public health infrastructure. However, during a year-long ethnographic study at a Somali health center, Kari Campeau found that personal stories from parents offered a much different picture of vaccine refusal than the one painted by news media. Tracking refusals across four sites, Campeau argues for the importance of approaching refusals as rhetorical and participatory strategies that hold institutions accountable, press for change, and practice care within emergent biosocial communities. Moreover, she views refusal as necessary and potentially transformative in situations where refusers have little access to power or platform. By contextualizing refusals in longer cultural and political histories, Campeau unsettles traditional narratives of medical dissent while offering new entry points into discussions on racialized biopolitics, care, disability, and public health.

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