Results by title

Primary care has come into the limelight with the passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, the unchecked and unsustainable rise in American health care expenditures, and the crest of Baby Boomers who are now Medicare-eligible and entering the most health care–intensive period of their lives. Yet how much is really known about primary care? What Matters in Medicine: Lessons from a Life in Primary Care is a look at the past, present, and future of general practice, which is not only the predecessor to the modern primary care movement, but its foundation. Through memoir and conversation, Dr. David Loxterkamp reflects on the heroes and role models who drew him to family medicine and on his many years in family practice in a rural Maine community, and provides a prescription for change in the way that doctors and patients approach their shared contract for good health and a happy life. This book will be useful to those on both sides of primary care, doctors and patients alike.

Whose School Is It?: Women, Children, Memory, and Practice in the City is a success story with roadblocks, crashes, and detours. Rhoda Halperin uses feminist theorist and activist Gloria Anzaldúa's ideas about borderlands created by colliding cultures to deconstruct the creation and advancement of a public community charter school in a diverse, long-lived urban neighborhood on the Ohio River. Class, race, and gender mix with age, local knowledge, and place authenticity to create a page-turning story of grit, humor, and sheer stubbornness. The school has grown and flourished in the face of daunting market forces, class discrimination, and an increasingly unfavorable national climate for charter schools. Borderlands are tense spaces. The school is a microcosm of the global city.

Many theoretical strands converge in this book—feminist theory, ideas about globalization, class analysis, and accessible narrative writing—to present some new approaches in urban anthropology. The book is multi-voiced and nuanced in ways that provide authenticity and texture to the real circumstances of urban lives. At the same time, identities are threatened as community practices clash with rules and regulations imposed by outsiders.

Since it is based on fifteen years of ethnographic fieldwork in the community and the city, Whose School Is It? brings unique long-term perspectives on continuities and disjunctures in cities. Halperin's work as researcher and advocate also provides insider perspectives that are rare in the literature of urban anthropology.

An accessible primer on aesthetics in art and everyday life, written by artist and scholar Walead Beshty. 

In this general guide to the foundations of aesthetics, Walead Beshty introduces the complexities of aesthetics through succinct language and real-world examples, presenting an introductory theory of how the world becomes known to us through our senses and how that knowledge in turn builds our experience of everything around us.

Considering aesthetics on both a practical and a theoretical level, Worlds of Appearance asserts that art and aesthetics are inherently political, composing a fundamental form of communication and a means by which we can imagine the very nature of what can be experienced, sensed, and expressed. Aesthetics, argues Beshty, is a corporeal and material area of study, one that reveals how we perceive the world and how we develop technologies in response. With this book, he aims to fill a gap in existing writing about aesthetics, offering a clear explanation of how it acts as a dynamic force in our daily lives, how it functions on a concrete level, and how we can understand its possibilities.

Beginning with how we transform a flood of sensations into a coherent perception of the world, the book considers the basics of aesthetic production and reception, then moves on to look at specific examples of aesthetics in practice, with a focus on art, architecture, and performance. It concludes by laying out how aesthetic literacy is key to understanding the production of wide-ranging aspects of our lives, including digitization, mass media, systems of communications, and power relations.