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From remote villages and nomadic encampments to World Health Organization headquarters, a vivid ethnography of the Global Polio Eradication Initiative
Provides a detailed look at how war affects human life and health far beyond the battlefield Since 2010, a team of activists, social scientists, and physicians have monitored the lives lost as a result of the US wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan through an initiative called the Costs of War Project. Unlike most studies of war casualties, this research looks beyond lives lost in violence to consider those who have died as a result of illness, injuries, and malnutrition that would not have occurred had the war not taken place. Incredibly, the Cost of War Project has found that, of the more than 1,000,000 lives lost in the recent US wars, a minimum of 800,000 died not from violence, but f...
For many of the 1.6 million U.S. service members who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001, the trip home is only the beginning of a longer journey. Many undergo an awkward period of readjustment to civilian life after long deployments. Some veterans may find themselves drinking too much, unable to sleep or waking from unspeakable dreams, lashing out at friends and loved ones. Over time, some will struggle so profoundly that they eventually are diagnosed with post-traumatic stress Disorder (PTSD). Both heartbreaking and hopeful, Fields of Combat tells the story of how American veterans and their families navigate the return home. Following a group of veterans and their their persona...
Key to African studies is understanding the knowledge systems of the continent and her diaspora. The representation and understanding of Africa are dependent on the observer’s definition of knowledge. Afrocentric knowledge is comprised of a collection of political, religious, and indigenous belief systems. Religious Beliefs and Knowledge Systems in Africa begins with deconstructing the Western philosophy of knowledge before defining and exploring the epistemic disciplines of Africa. It transcends postcolonial critique, through an Afrocentric approach to knowledge divided into three key themes. The first of these is the African worldview, exploring knowledge through eldership, witchcraft, and divination. This is followed up by kingship ideology and epistemologies, exploring discussing how politics, religion, and belief shape African society. Finally, the world religion chapter examines Christianity, Islam, and Pentecostalism in their impact on African ways of knowing. This book calls to action new fields of study in universities, encouraging a greater understanding of African ways of knowing through more nuanced disciplines.
"Set within a Latina program at an Intimate Partner Violence crisis center, this book explores experiences with disability and aging for immigrant survivors of domestic violence across the life course"--
This book explores issues surrounding measles and vaccination in Pakistan. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research, it focuses on two major outbreaks in Sindh Province and on Pakistan’s vaccination campaigns. The chapters examine the responses to outbreaks and vaccination from various stakeholders including local people, the Pakistani government and the WHO. Inayat Ali reflects on the competing agendas, differing conceptualizations of measles and vaccination, and the factors that lie behind these contestations. Situating outbreaks within the institutionalized form of disparities, he analyzes the rituals used to deal with measles and local resistance to vaccines in Pakistan. The distinct imaginaries and practices related to measles and vaccination are considered in national and global context, and the book makes a valuable contribution to the development of an anthropology of vaccination and medical anthropology of Pakistan.
All I Eat Is Medicine charts the lives of individuals and the operation of institutions in the thick of the AIDS epidemic in Mozambique during the global scale-up of treatment for HIV/AIDS at the turn of the twenty-first century. Even as the AIDS treatment scale-up saved lives, it perpetuated the exploitation and exclusion that was implicated in the propagation of the epidemic in the first place. This book calls attention to the global social commitments and responsibilities that a truly therapeutic global health requires.
This practical and accessible textbook provides an overview of the key principles for conducting ethnography in healthcare settings. Shedding new light on healthcare delivery and experiences, ethnographic research methods provide a useful set of tools for observing how people act in the world and help us understand why people act as they do. Increasingly recognized for their explanatory power, especially around behavior and social context, ethnographic methods are an invaluable approach for understanding challenges and processes in healthcare services and delivery. This guide takes the reader step-by-step through the research process, from grant writing and study design to data collection an...
There is an inherently powerful and complex paradox underlying HIV/AIDS prevention—between the focus on collective advocacy mobilized to combat global HIV/AIDS and the staggeringly disproportionate rates of HIV/AIDS in many places. In Treating AIDS, Thurka Sangaramoorthy examines the everyday practices of HIV/AIDS prevention in the United States from the perspective of AIDS experts and Haitian immigrants in South Florida. Although there is worldwide emphasis on the universality of HIV/AIDS as a social, political, economic, and biomedical problem, developments in HIV/AIDS prevention are rooted in and focused exclusively on disparities in HIV/AIDS morbidity and mortality framed through the r...
In 2004, the government of Malawi took the ambitious step of offering antiretroviral therapy to anyone who needed it. Health on Delivery examines how the antiretroviral rollout unfolded, moving from World Health Organization boardrooms in Geneva to clinics held under trees in rural Malawi. This engaging and accessible ethnographic study focuses on the patients, healthcare providers, and policy-makers involved. It provides an analytic framework to address the processes by which global policy is made and implemented.