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"Developing to Scale examines the techno-centric structure of global health practice through the history of the concept of appropriate technology. By looking at how certain technologies have been defined as more or less "appropriate" for the global south, based on assumptions about gender, race, culture, and environment, Heidi Morefield reveals the ways in which questions of technological scale have fundamentally shaped global health practice today. The idea that there was an "appropriate" level of technology, between the traditional and the modern, that would lead to sustainable social and economic development originated in the mid-1960s and gained considerable prominence in the 1970s. US f...
The first critical book on “appropriate technology,” Developing to Scale shows how global health came to be understood as a problem to be solved with the right technical interventions. In 1973, economist E. F. Schumacher published Small Is Beautiful, which introduced a mainstream audience to his theory of “appropriate technology”: the belief that international development projects in the Global South were most sustainable when they were small-scale, decentralized, and balanced between the traditional and the modern. His theory gained widespread appeal, as cuts to the foreign aid budget, the national interests of nations seeking greater independence, postcolonial activism, and the ris...
How insecticide-treated bed nets became a staple of global public health initiatives and reshaped health practices in Africa and beyond. Distributed to millions of people annually across Africa and the global south, insecticide-treated bed nets have become a cornerstone of malaria control and twenty-first-century global health initiatives. Despite their seemingly obvious public health utility, however, these chemically infused nets and their rise to prominence were anything but inevitable. In Nothing But Nets, Kirsten Moore-Sheeley untangles the complicated history of insecticide-treated nets as it unfolded transnationally and in Kenya specifically—a key site of insecticide-treated net res...
This gripping history shows how the electronic devices we use to access care influence the kind of care we receive. The Doctor Who Wasn’t There traces the long arc of enthusiasm for—and skepticism of—electronic media in health and medicine. Over the past century, a series of new technologies promised to democratize access to healthcare. From the humble telephone to the connected smartphone, from FM radio to wireless wearables, from cable television to the “electronic brains” of networked mainframe computers: each new platform has promised a radical reformation of the healthcare landscape. With equal attention to the history of technology, the history of medicine, and the politics a...
A sweeping history explores why people living in resource-poor areas lack access to basic health care after billions of dollars have been invested in international-health assistance. Over the past century, hundreds of billions of dollars have been invested in programs aimed at improving health on a global scale. Given the enormous scale and complexity of these lifesaving operations, why do millions of people in low-income countries continue to live without access to basic health services, sanitation, or clean water? And why are deadly diseases like Ebola able to spread so quickly among populations? In A History of Global Health, Randall M. Packard argues that global-health initiatives have s...
The Routledge History of U.S. Foreign Relations provides a comprehensive view of U.S. diplomacy and foreign affairs from the founding to the present. With contributions from recognized experts from around the world, this volume unveils America’s long and complicated history on the world stage. It presents the United States’ evolution from a weak player, even a European pawn, to a global hegemonic leader over the course of two and a half centuries. The contributors offer an expansive vision of U.S. foreign relations—from U.S.-Native American diplomacy in eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to the post-9/11 war on terror. They shed new light on well-known events and suggest future paths ...
For many liberal commentators at the turn of the 1990s, the collapse of the Soviet Union represented a final victory for Western reason and capitalist democracy. But, in recent years, liberal norms and institutions associated with the post-Cold War moment have been challenged by a visceral and affective politics. Electorates have increasingly opted for a closing inwards of the nation-state, not just in the democratic heartlands of Europe and North America, but also on the periphery of the world economy. As the popular appeal of the ‘open society’ is thrown into question, it is necessary to revisit assumptions about the permanence of its enabling political and ethical projects. Previously...
Nationally acclaimed investigative journalist Seamus Bruner reveals how billionaires like Bill Gates, George Soros, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg plan to control every aspect of daily life—from food and energy to reproduction and your personal data. Imagine a world in which you own nothing and rent everything. Most of the protein in your diet comes from bugs, while lab-grown meats are a rare, expensive delicacy. You are not allowed to have more than one child, and your financial and medical data are instantly transferred to a centralized government database via a subdermal microchip. Controligarchs warns that this will be our existence if the supranational elites of the World Economic Fo...
When asked to compare the practice of medicine today to that of a hundred years ago, most people will respond with a story of therapeutic revolution: Back then we had few effective remedies, but now we have more (and more powerful) tools to fight disease, from antibiotics to psychotropics to steroids to anticancer agents. This collection challenges the historical accuracy of this revolutionary narrative and offers instead a more nuanced account of the process of therapeutic innovation and the relationships between the development of medicines and social change. These assembled histories and ethnographies span three continents and use the lived experiences of physicians and patients, consumers and providers, and marketers and regulators to reveal the tensions between universal claims of therapeutic knowledge and the actual ways these claims have been used and understood in specific sites, from postwar West Germany pharmacies to twenty-first century Nigerian street markets. By asking us to rethink a story we thought we knew, Therapeutic Revolutions offers invaluable insights to historians, anthropologists, and social scientists of medicine.
Descontrolada apresenta os desafios cotidianos para cuidar da saúde, em especial dos "problemas de pressão". Os moradores e as moradoras do bairro histórico da Guariroba, localizado na cidade de Ceilândia/Distrito Federal, são, em geral, migrantes nordestinos, goianos e mineiros que vieram construir a capital federal nos anos 1950 e 1960. Em meio às suas narrativas heroicas de desafiar a pobreza na região de origem e enfrentar os perigos e aventuras na região de destino, eles vão chegando mais perto da atualidade, com corpos mais velhos, corações mais fracos e os nervos mais suscetíveis. A pressão se descontrola e razões precisam ser encontradas para compreendê-la, bem como tratamentos e serviços precisam ser acionados para dela cuidarem. A partir de uma extensa pesquisa antropológica, o livro descreve esses caminhos de interpretação e cuidado da pressão alta, passando por diferentes atores, espaços, estratégias.