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11 books match the query 'Harm'

cover of Carry Me Gently: On Maternal Life, Care, and Harm

Carry Me Gently

On Maternal Life, Care, and Harm

Lalaie Ameeriar

Duke University Press, 2027

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cover of Ecologies of Harm: Rhetorics of Violence in the United States

Ecologies of Harm

Rhetorics of Violence in the United States

Megan Eatman

The Ohio State University Press, 2020

Ecologies of Harm: Rhetorics of Violence in the United States examines violent spectacles and their quotidian manifestations in order to better understand violence’s cultural work and persistence. Starting with the supposition that violence is communicative andmeant to “send a message”—be it to deter, to scare, or to threaten—Megan Eatman goes one step further to argue that violence needs to be understood on a deeper level: as direct, structural, cultural, and constitutive across modes, a formulation that requires rethinking its rhetorical aims as less about conscious persuasion and more about the gradual shaping of public identity.
 
While Eatman looks to examples of violent spectacles to make her case (lynching, capital punishment, and torture in the War on Terror), it is in her analysis of more mundane responses to these forms of violence (congressional debates, court documents, visual art, and memorial performance) where the key to her argument lies—as she shows how circulating violence in these ways produces violent rhetorical ecologies that facilitate some modes of being while foreclosing others. Through this ecological approach, Ecologies of Harm offers a new understanding of the debates surrounding legacies of violence, examines how rhetoric and violence function together, and explores implications of their entanglement for antiviolence work.
 
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cover of Fake News – What’s the harm?: Four ideas for fact-checkers, policymakers & platforms on countering the consequences of false information & defending free speech

Fake News – What’s the harm?

Four ideas for fact-checkers, policymakers & platforms on countering the consequences of false information & defending free speech

Peter Cunliffe-Jones

University of Westminster Press, 2025

Former news reporter and founder of Africa’s first fact-checking organisation Peter Cunliffe-Jones argues that since concern about ‘information disorder’ soared in 2016, we have laboured under flawed assumptions about the nature and effects of ‘fake news’ and misinformation. Based on a four-year review of 250 case studies, Cunliffe-Jones sets out four ideas for fact-checkers, policymakers and platforms to curb harmful consequences and protect wider freedom of speech. First, information disorder is about more than misinformation. Second, misinformation in offline settings can cause as big a problem as misinformation online. Third, misinformation that affects policymakers can be as bad as misinformation that affects the public. Fourth, he proposes a model for fact-checkers, researchers and platforms to distinguish false claims that do and do not have substantive potential to cause substantive consequences.
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cover of First Do No Harm: Humanitarian Intervention and the Destruction of Yugoslavia

First Do No Harm

Humanitarian Intervention and the Destruction of Yugoslavia

David N. Gibbs

Vanderbilt University Press, 2009

In First Do No Harm, David Gibbs raises basic questions about the humanitarian interventions that have played a key role in U.S. foreign policy for the past twenty years. Using a wide range of sources, including government documents, transcripts of international war crimes trials, and memoirs, Gibbs shows how these interventions often heightened violence and increased human suffering.

The book focuses on the 1991-99 breakup of Yugoslavia, which helped forge the idea that the United States and its allies could stage humanitarian interventions that would end ethnic strife. It is widely believed that NATO bombing campaigns in Bosnia and Kosovo played a vital role in stopping Serb-directed aggression, and thus resolving the conflict.

Gibbs challenges this view, offering an extended critique of Samantha Power's Pulitzer Prize-winning book, A Problem from Hell: America in the Age of Genocide. He shows that intervention contributed to the initial breakup of Yugoslavia, and then helped spread the violence and destruction. Gibbs also explains how the motives for U.S. intervention were rooted in its struggle for continued hegemony in Europe.

First Do No Harm argues for a new, noninterventionist model for U.S. foreign policy, one that deploys nonmilitary methods for addressing ethnic violence.
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cover of First, Do No Harm: Power, Oppression, and Violence in Healthcare

First, Do No Harm

Power, Oppression, and Violence in Healthcare

Edited by Nancy L. Diekelmann

University of Wisconsin Press, 2002

    First, Do No Harm shows how health care professionals, with the best intentions of providing excellent, holistic health care, can nonetheless perpetuate violence against vulnerable patients. The essays investigate the need to rethink contemporary healthcare practices in ways that can bring the art and science of medicine back into sorely needed balance.
    These ground-breaking studies by noted scholars question commonly held assumptions in contemporary healthcare that underlie oppressive power dynamics and even violence for patients and their families. The contributors discuss such topics as women and violence, life-support technologies, and healthcare professionals’ own experiences as patients. First, Do No Harm opens the discourse for reaching new understandings, from reassessing the meaning of "quality of life" to questioning the appropriateness of the very language used by healthcare professionals. It will be welcomed by healthcare workers and by scholars in nursing, medicine, and the allied health sciences.

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cover of Harm

Harm

Hillary Gravendyk

Omnidawn, 2012

Offering a new narrative of physical body constituted in perilous scenes of contact, Harm performs the loss of that fictive division between a unified body and its surrounding world. Terrifying and unlooked- for harmonies emerge in these poems, which dwell in a medicalized landscape where both the body and the land are monitored and laid bare. Troubling the idea of cure by recasting it in the terms of harm, Harm shifts between warning and error, nature and the body. In the sense of Baudelaire’s “correspondences,” bloodclots externalize into “sunclots” and the air is “rusty with blood.” The book troubles the idea of cure by casting it also as a form of harm itself. Moving amid the prose poem and the lyric, Harm navigates a landscape of extremity both frightening and filled with wonders.
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cover of Intersections of Harm: Narratives of Latina Deviance and Defiance

Intersections of Harm

Narratives of Latina Deviance and Defiance

Halperin, Laura

Rutgers University Press, 0

In this innovative new study, Laura Halperin examines literary representations of harm inflicted on Latinas’ minds and bodies, and on the places Latinas inhabit, but she also explores how hope can be found amid so much harm. Analyzing contemporary memoirs and novels by Irene Vilar, Loida Maritza Pérez, Ana Castillo, Cristina García, and Julia Alvarez, she argues that the individual harm experienced by Latinas needs to be understood in relation to the collective histories of aggression against their communities. 
 
Intersections of Harm is more than just a nuanced examination of the intersections among race, ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality. It also explores the intersections of deviance and defiance, individual and collective, and mind, body, and place. Halperin proposes that, ironically, the harmful ascriptions of Latina deviance are tied to the hopeful expressions of Latina defiance. While the Latina protagonists’ defiance feeds into the labels of deviance imposed on them, it also fuels the protagonists’ ability to resist such harmful treatment.  In this analysis, Halperin broadens the parameters of literary studies of female madness, as she compels us to shift our understanding of where madness lies. She insists that the madness readily attributed to individual Latinas is entwined with the madness of institutional structures of oppression, and she maintains that psychological harm is bound together with physical and geopolitical harm.
 
In her pan-Latina study, Halperin shows how each writer’s work emerges from a unique set of locales and histories, but she also traces a network of connections among them. Bringing together concepts from feminism, postcolonialism, illness studies, and ecocriticism, Intersections of Harm opens up exciting new avenues for Latina/o studies. 
 
 
 
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cover of More than "First, Do No Harm": Academic Global Health

More than "First, Do No Harm"

Academic Global Health

Timothy R. B. Johnson

Michigan Publishing Services, 2023

Using personal experience and narrative, as well as the voices of students, trainees, and academic colleagues, this book illustrates how an initiative beginning over thirty years ago to train obstetrician-gynecologists in Ghana can serve as a model for global engagement by universities and learners at many levels. In addition to detailing a proven sustainable model for global health programs, this book highlights the ethical and moral imperatives participants should expect and demand of truly engaged academic global health. 

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cover of Reckoning with Harm: The Toxic Relations of Oil in Amazonia

Reckoning with Harm

The Toxic Relations of Oil in Amazonia

Amelia Fiske

University of Texas Press, 2023

2025 Margaret Mead Award, Society for Applied Anthropology (SfAA) and the American Anthropological Association (AAA)

An ethnography of the Ecuadorian Amazon that demonstrates the need for a relational, place-based, contingent understanding of harm and toxicity.

Reckoning with Harm is a striking ethnographic analysis of the harm resulting from oil extraction. Covering fifty years of settler colonization and industrial transformation of the Ecuadorian Amazon, Amelia Fiske interrogates the relations of harm. She moves between forest-courtrooms and oily waste pits, farms and toxic tours, to explore both the ways in which harm from oil is entangled with daily life and the tensions surrounding efforts to verify and redress it in practice. Attempts to address harm from the oil industry in Ecuador have been consistently confounded by narrow, technocratic understandings of evidence, toxicity, and responsibility. Building on collaborators’ work to contest state and oil company insistence that harm is controlled and principally chemical in nature, Fiske shows that it is necessary to refigure harm as relational in order to reckon with unremediated contamination of the past while pushing for broad forms of accountability in the present. She theorizes that harm is both a relationship and an animating feature of relationships in this place, a contingent understanding that is needed to contemplate what comes next when living in a toxic world.

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cover of The Love Surgeon: A Story of Trust, Harm, and the Limits of Medical Regulation

The Love Surgeon

A Story of Trust, Harm, and the Limits of Medical Regulation

Sarah B. Rodriguez

Rutgers University Press, 2020

Dr. James Burt believed women’s bodies were broken, and only he could fix them. In the 1950s, this Ohio OB-GYN developed what he called “love surgery,” a unique procedure he maintained enhanced the sexual responses of a new mother, transforming her into “a horny little house mouse.” Burt did so without first getting the consent of his patients. Yet he was allowed to practice for over thirty years, mutilating hundreds of women in the process.

It would be easy to dismiss Dr. Burt as a monstrous aberration, a modern-day Dr. Frankenstein. Yet as medical historian Sarah Rodriguez reveals, that’s not the whole story. The Love Surgeon asks tough questions about Burt’s heinous acts and what they reveal about the failures of the medical establishment: How was he able to perform an untested surgical procedure? Why wasn’t he obliged to get informed consent from his patients? And why did it take his peers so long to take action?

The Love Surgeon is both a medical horror story and a cautionary tale about the limits of professional self-regulation.
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cover of Water Brings No Harm: Management Knowledge and the Struggle for the Waters of Kilimanjaro

Water Brings No Harm

Management Knowledge and the Struggle for the Waters of Kilimanjaro

Matthew V. Bender

Ohio University Press, 2019

In Water Brings No Harm, Matthew V. Bender explores the history of community water management on Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania. Kilimanjaro’s Chagga-speaking peoples have long managed water by employing diverse knowledge: hydrological, technological, social, cultural, and political. Since the 1850s, they have encountered groups from beyond the mountain—colonial officials, missionaries, settlers, the independent Tanzanian state, development agencies, and climate scientists—who have understood water differently. Drawing on the concept of waterscapes—a term that describes how people “see” water, and how physical water resources intersect with their own beliefs, needs, and expectations—Bender argues that water conflicts should be understood as struggles between competing forms of knowledge.

Water Brings No Harm encourages readers to think about the origins and interpretation of knowledge and development in Africa and the global south. It also speaks to the current global water crisis, proposing a new model for approaching sustainable water development worldwide.

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