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The central importance of reproductive health and abortion in the competition over Russia's political and cultural liberalization or nationalist revival
The need for informed analyses of health policy is now greater than ever. The twelve essays in this volume show that public debates routinely bypass complex ethical, sociocultural, historical, and political questions about how we should address ideals of justice and equality in health care. Integrating perspectives from the humanities, social sciences, medicine, and public health, this volume illuminates the relationships between justice and health inequalities to enrich debates. Understanding Health Inequalities and Justice explores three questions: How do scholars approach relations between health inequalities and ideals of justice? When do justice considerations inform solutions to health...
Russia's maternal health crisis and postsocialist transition examined through ethnographic observation in clinics and hospitals.
Once celebrated as a model development for its progressive social indicators, the southern Indian state of Kerala has earned the new distinction as the nation’s suicide capital, with suicide rates soaring to triple the national average since 1990. Rather than an aberration on the path to development and modernity, Keralites understand this crisis to be the bitter fruit borne of these historical struggles and the aspirational dilemmas they have produced in everyday life. Suicide, therefore, offers a powerful lens onto the experiential and affective dimensions of development and global change in the postcolonial world. In the long shadow of fear and uncertainty that suicide casts in Kerala, living acquires new meaning and contours. In this powerful ethnography, Jocelyn Chua draws on years of fieldwork to broaden the field of vision beyond suicide as the termination of life, considering how suicide generates new ways of living in these anxious times.
The post-Soviet years have widely been interpreted as a period of intense moral questioning, debate, and struggle. Despite this claim, few studies have revealed how this moral experience has been lived and articulated by Russians themselves. This book provides an intimate portrait of how five Muscovites have experienced the post-Soviet years as a period of intense refashioning of their moral personhood, and how this process can only be understood at the intersection of their unique personal experiences, a shared Russian/Soviet history, and increasingly influential global discourses and practices. The result is a new approach to understanding everyday moral experience and the processes by which new moral persons are cultivated.
Although pain is a universal human experience, many view the pain of others as private, resistant to language, and, therefore, essentially unknowable. And, yet, despite the obvious limits to comprehending another’s internal state, language is all that we have to translate pain from the solitary and unknowable to a phenomenon richly described in literature, medicine, and everyday life. Without denying the private dimensions of pain, All in Your Head offers an entirely fresh perspective that considers how pain may be configured, managed, explained, and even experienced in deeply relational ways. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in a pediatric pain clinic in California, Mara Buchbinder explores how clinicians, adolescent patients, and their families make sense of puzzling symptoms and work to alleviate pain. Through careful attention to the language of pain—including narratives, conversations, models, and metaphors—and detailed analysis of how young pain sufferers make meaning through interactions with others, her book reveals that however private pain may be, making sense of it is profoundly social.
Family, Sex, and Faith is the first systematic examination of what the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) teaches and how believers respond to its messages regarding issues such as marriage, divorce, contraception, abortion, husband-wife relations, and LGBTQIA+ rights. According to Pål Kolstø, for the ROC, the ethics of private life involve what Michel Foucault called "biopolitics": the state regulates the sex lives of its citizens to control the development of the population. Family, Sex, and Faith offers a systematic analysis of aspects of the moral theology of the ROC, discussing the means and strategies it employs to achieve its goals, to counter resistance, and to emerge victorious from the battles in which it is embroiled. Although the constitution defines Russia as a secular state, the ROC has achieved a privileged position in society, functioning as a major provider of ideology and legitimacy for the Putin regime.
Considers democratization, privatization, and women's lives in postcolonial Ukraine.
This collective study of the James siblings—Alice, William, and Henry—lights up their shared intellectual project: showing how minds meet in a world teeming with possibilities and risks. Philosophical Siblings offers a fresh way of thinking about literary encounters, one that approaches even the most iconic texts with serious lightness.
Julie Hemment's engrossing study traces the development encounter through interactions between international foundations and Russian women's groups during a decade of national collapse. Prohibited from organizing independently under state socialism, women's groups became a focus of attention in the mid-1990s for foundations eager to promote participatory democracy, but the version of civil society that has emerged (the "third sector") is far from what Russian activists envisioned and what donor agencies promised. Drawing on ethnographic methods and Participatory Action Research, Hemment tells the story of her introduction to and growing collaboration with members of the group Zhenskii Svet (Women's Light) in the provincial city of Tver'.